Printing and the @page thingie Options

[Brian Chandler]

I spent some time last week getting my shop printing to work (more or less) under Linux. I found a number of bugs in Opera (margins are wrong, won't print multiple copies) so for some things I'm using Firefox, despite the horrendous and long-standing bug in FF that means it doesn't work properly outside the USA. (The default paper size is an oddity peculiar to this one country, but every time you print it returns to this silly setting.)

Anyway, along the way I found some discussion of the @page specifier that seemed to say it was just hopeless, and better avoided. Any opinions?

I have also found it impossible to get page-break-inside:avoid to work. Opera happily breaks any element with this property, just about anywhere. (Obviously it's not too big to fit on a page.) Before I implement a manual repagination function (mercifully, page-break-before:always etc _do_ seem to work) does anyone have any suggestions or references?

The usual response is to say I should make a pdf, but I am not talking about a single page I can massage by hand, I'm talking about invoices which are all different. It's not really believable that the convert-to-pdf rendering engine would be better than any browser at getting this stuff right.