*** This will not work in any version of Netscape ***
There are going to be times when a user
visiting your site is going to want to print out a copy of one of
your pages, to save as a hardcopy. Normally, browsers will just
send all of that information over to the printer with little regard
for how you want it to be displayed on paper. If your page is
text-heavy (for example, I ran into this problem when I needed to
display a sales contract for a client), this can be
unacceptable.
There are work-arounds to this problem. One way to solve this
would be to convert your page into a .PDF file (eventually, that
tutorial will be put up onto this site). This gives you the ability
to control all aspects of how the page is printed. However, often
times just being able to force a page break is enough to get the
job done.
First, you need to create a file with the extension .css (this
will be your cascading style sheet -- we'll call it "printer.css").
The class must be defined in a seperate .css file, as older
versions of IE will not handle it properly if it is an in-line
STYLE attribute. In this .css file, create a class like this:
Then, in your web page, make a reference to the .css file. Your
page breaks will occur every time you have a TAG with the CLASS
attribute set to "pagebreak" (in this example, we'll use a DIV
tag). Finally, you need to include some javascript code to get the
page to print. In this example, we placed the code in the "onLoad"
event of the BODY tag. The window.print function accepts one of two
values for ORIENTATION, either "portrait" or "landscape." The page
should look like this:
This is the text that will appear on the first page. This is the
text that will appear on the second page.
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