Printing and Paginated Media
October 30, 2000
Earlier in this chapter, we talked about media groups. One of these
media groups dealt with presentation to continuous and paginated media.
As we said before, paginated media is different from continuous media in
that the document content is split into discrete 'pages' when it is
rendered. Continuous media, as its name implies, does not split the
document content, keeping it as one continuous entity when it is
rendered.
In summary, there are three ways of handling printed media:
- print media type
- page breaking properties
- @page rule
You can use any or all of these methods when creating a document.
The print media type allows us to change the presentation of the
document: things like whether to use a serif or a sans-serif font, which
the font-size, background-colors, etc. We talked about the print media
type and other media types earlier in this chapter.
The page breaking properties allow us to relate how content is
displayed on the pages defined by the @page rule: things like avoiding
page breaks before certain elements and forcing an image to appear on a
right-hand page, etc.
The @page rule allows you to define the context for printing – in
essence, it allows you to describe the paper: things like the size of
the paper, its margins, and so on.
We will learn about the @page rule and the page breaking properties in
the following sections.
Page Breaking Properties Page breaking properties provide a way
for us to control where page breaks (i.e. where one page ends and the
next one begins) occur when our document is printed. New sections and
chapters often begin on new pages and you may wish to control page
breaks around images (perhaps forcing a page break before an image or
preventing a page break following an image).
For example, if we want to make a paragraph start on a new page, we
would write:
<p style="page-break-before: always">
This is the first paragraph of text on a new page.
</p>
In this example, we set the page-break-before property to always, which
means that a page break will always occur before this paragraph.
You can also use style sheets, as in this example:
h1 { page-break-before: always }
This means that every level-one header will start on a new printed page.
There are several page breaking properties:
- page-break-before
- page-break-after
- page-break-inside
- orphans
- widows
Each of these properties can have different values that affect whether
the page break occurs all of the time or under special conditions.
The 'page-break-before' and 'page-break-after' Properties
As you can guess, the page-break-before property controls whether a page
break occurs before an element. Likewise, the page-break-after property
controls whether a page break occurs after an element. Both of these
properties can have one of the following values and meanings:
| Value |
page-break-before |
page-break-after |
| "auto" |
A page break should not be forced or forbidden before
the element. |
A page break should not be forced or forbidden after the
element. |
| "always" |
A page break should be forced (always occur) before the element. |
A page break should be forced (always occur) after the element. |
| Value |
page-break-before |
page-break-after |
| "avoid" |
A page break should be avoided before the element. |
A page break should be avoided after the element. |
| "left" |
One or more page breaks should be forced so that the element appears on the left hand page. |
One or more page breaks should be forced so that the content appearing after the element appears on the left hand page. |
| "right" |
One or more page breaks should be forced so that the element appears on the right hand page. |
One or more page breaks should be forced so that the content appearing after the element appears on the right hand page. |
Creating Media-Dependent Style Sheets
Beginning XHTML
Using the 'page-break-before' Property
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