Printing Tables

miker169 · April 15th, 2009, 05:00 AM

I'm having issues with tables which are dynamically generated depending on answeres provided by a user. The html for the tables is then converted to a PDF document, the problem I am having is sometime the tables are breaking over 2 pages, and looks very undesirable. I have been looking at possible solutions ( using orphans, page-break-inside:avoid ), but havent had any success with any of these options just yet. Does anyone have any ideas ?

chroniclemaster1 · April 21st, 2009, 04:09 AM

How do you want this to react? This is fairly complicated because you're not only dealing with the table code but PDF behavior as well. Not sure if I can help, but I'll see what I can do.

miker169 · April 21st, 2009, 04:17 AM

Preventing the pages breaking in the middle of a table is the solution I am looking for. Without creating a pagebreak before each table as the tables are quite small. This looks fine for the html version of the tables , but gets very messy with the pdf doc. Each a user inputs data into my web app where the tables appear can be different or the tables may not appear at all !! I would be much obbliged if you can help me with this.

Cheers

chroniclemaster1 · April 23rd, 2009, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by miker169

I'mI have been looking at possible solutions ( using orphans, page-break-inside:avoid ), but havent had any success with any of these options just yet.

I know there are some CSS printing control commands in CSS though I haven't worked with them, but then it looks like this is what you've tried correct?

PS Kudos for looking to the CSS! I'm a big believer in Web Standards and get depressed when I see people pouring on the inline style elements through the control properties. It's their website, but it bugs me seeing people use techniques so devastating to the website's maintainability.

miker169 · April 23rd, 2009, 03:41 PM

I think the web standards is the problem some of the paged media elements such as orphans, widows etc just aren't implemented within some browsers. Not IE6 or IE7 which is a requirement( why can't everyone use ff , would make us developers lives much easier ) unfortunately and also not in the PDF engine I am using ( web supergoo's ABCPDF ). So I have created a temporary solution, which is to create calculated page breaks, its not pretty and its not easily maintable and its not easy to read, but works (for now at least) until I come up with a better solution.