Page layout for printing

It has always been difficult to get a decent print of an HTML page. Internet Explorer and Netscape print the same page in different ways; the margins are different, the page breaks are different…..

CSS version 2 tries to supply properties so that you have some control over how the browser prints your page.

So, there are two things to think about when you use style sheets to control how you page prints. First, you need to think about what size the page is, whether it is portrait or landscape, how wide the margins are and what printing marks you might want. Secondly, you need to worry about where the page breaks are and what to do with widow and orphans.

You use the @page property to define the size and layout of the page itself, the page-break-before, page-break-after and page-break-inside properties to define the page breaks, the marks property to add crop marks cross marks or both on a page and the widows and orphans property to control the minimum number of lines that can appear at the top and bottom of the page.