Printing Properties

These Style Sheet printing extensions are aimed at documents that will use the <STYLE MEDIA="print"...> style sheet setting, specifying the style sheet as being suitable for printed documents. Note that the printing extensions are only a recent addition to Style Sheets and are claimed to be supported by Internet Explorer 4.0.

page-break-after
Value: auto | always | left | right
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level elements outside of tables
Inherited: no
Percentage values: N/A

The values are:

auto
do a page break after the element only if necessary (e.g. if there is no remaining space on the current page)
always
always do a page break after the element
left
do one or two page breaks after the element until a blank left page is reached
right
do one or two page breaks after the element until a blank right page is reached

As an example, a hard page break may be inserted in the document with the BR tag as follows:

<STYLE>
BR.page { page-break-after: always }
</STYLE>
...
<BR CLASS=page>
...

If there are conflicts between this property and the 'page-break-before' value on the previous element (as formatted on the canvas), the value that results in the largest number of page breaks will be used.

Note: a way to suppress page breaks after an element is currently under discussion by the W3C, but the syntax is not yet defined.

page-break-before
Value: auto | always | left | right
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level elements outside of tables
Inherited: no
Percentage values: N/A

The values are:

auto
do a page break before the element only if necessary (e.g. if there is no remaining space on the current page)
always
always do a page break before the element
left
do one or two page breaks before the element until a blank left page is reached
right
do one or two page breaks before the element until a blank right page is reached

As an example, a page break may be inserted in the document before all H1 elements:

<STYLE>
H1 { page-break-before: always }
</STYLE>
...
<H1 CLASS=chapter>
...

If there are conflicts between this property and the 'page-break-after' value on the next element (as formatted on the canvas), the value that results in the largest number of page breaks will be used.

Note: a way to suppress page breaks before an element is currently under discussion by the W3C, but the syntax is not yet defined.