Advanced CSS Printing — Using CSS Page Breaks

By  on  

I have one customer that absolutely insists his web pages print perfectly. Why? Because he refuses to look at his pages on the screen -- he tells his employees to print the website for him to look at. And since he looks at pages that way, he believes most of his customers do just this.

Needless to say, I've learned quite a few tricks to making a website print properly. I've already shared methods for making your website content printer-friendly, as well as making your website structure printer-friendly. One important aspect of making your pages printer-friendly is by using CSS/XHTML page breaks.

There are numerous spots that are good for page breaks:

  • Between page sections (h2 or h3 tags, depending on your site format)
  • Between the end of an article and subsequent comments / trackbacks
  • Between longs blocks of content

Luckily, using page breaks in CSS is quite easy.

The CSS

The all and print medias should be addressed:

@media all {
	.page-break	{ display: none; }
}

@media print {
	.page-break	{ display: block; page-break-before: always; }
}

The first declaration ensures that the page-break is never seen visually...while the second ensures that the page break is seen by the printer.

The HTML

Creating a simple DIV element with the page-break class is how you implement the page break.

<div class="page-break"></div>

Quite simple, huh?

The Usage

<h1>Page Title</h1>
<!-- content block -->
<!-- content block -->
<div class="page-break"></div>
<!-- content block -->
<!-- content block -->
<div class="page-break"></div>
<!-- content block -->
<!-- content -->

There you have it. The importance of page breaks in the web should not be understated, as many users still print content regularly. Also note that your content may be printed into PDF format and shared.

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi &#8211; Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Rounded Corners

    The ability to create rounded corners with CSS opens the possibility of subtle design improvements without the need to include images.  CSS rounded corners thus save us time in creating images and requests to the server.  Today, rounded corners with CSS are supported by all of...

  • By
    MooTools Font-Size Scroller with Cookie Save

    Providing users as many preferences as possible always puts a smile on the user's face. One of those important preferences is font size. I can see fine but the next guy may have difficulty with the font size I choose. That's why...