page-breaks in html or pdf?

Hi, our company is sending aviso documents to customers. Aviso is in html form or in pdf form. I have to say, that it is probably generated by some SAP automat. The code is pretty ugly - strict css usage - placing ALL elements onto absolute pixel positions. The problem is, that if there is more than one doc for customer at one batch, it is generated as multi-doc document (html or pdf) - but - some of our customers complained that it is really difficult to print that way. I chcecked out and did not find any way of how to issue something like page-break in html. It is probably not even possible. What about pdf? Is there any chance to insert page-break into pdf doc? So far the fastest fix seems to be parsing html doc, dividing it into separate files - I could create some encapsulated tool for that, but I would rather fix problem in our primary ERP system than go for workarounds ... Thanks, -pekr-

Petr:

> I chcecked out and did not find any way of how to issue something > like page-break in html. It is probably not even possible.

Friday, December 5, 2003, 11:49:00 AM, Petr wrote:

> I chcecked out and did not find any way of how to issue something > like page-break in html. It is probably not even possible.

>The problem is, that if there is more than one doc for customer at one >batch, it is generated as multi-doc document (html or pdf) - but - some >of our customers complained that it is really difficult to print that >way. I chcecked out and did not find any way of how to issue something >like page-break in html. It is probably not even possible.

> What about >pdf? Is there any chance to insert page-break into pdf doc?

> The problem is, that if there is more than one doc for customer at one > batch, it is generated as multi-doc document (html or pdf) - but - some > would rather fix problem in our primary ERP system than go for > workarounds ...

>our company is sending aviso documents to customers.

Andreas Bolka wrote:

>Friday, December 5, 2003, 11:49:00 AM, Petr wrote: >>I chcecked out and did not find any way of how to issue something >you could achieve what you want. however, i don't know which browsers >respect those attributes.

Neither span nor pre are good to be using for what you want to do, pre if I remember correctly is supposed to be for keeping things as they are (deprecated and replaced by xmp if I recall correctly, although these are both not elements that I am in the habit of using), span on the other hand is for text that is considered to be inside of something else that needs to have another style placed on it. Although you can say that a span has size and position etc. (and sometimes to get a result from ie with minimum of effort you might want to do this) the usage should be to give spans styling such as bold, i, u, fonts, colors, etc. Stuff that is positioned etc. should probably be done via DIVS. As I said before I know that there are some implementations (prob. Half-assed) of css2+ media possibilities out there, and one of these is in IE, to get this to work might be problematic. I would try to follow something like this: http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/demos/printMediaCss.html i.e set your media attribute to be print on the stylesheet, give the span a specific class, then see if you can get page breaking when you print. So on the other subject, aviso is just an internal document format you mean, it's not a well-known document format output by some company etc. referencable by standards?

Also by using the @media property, http://www.ncdesign.org/html/s001.htm as shown here. Actually this just made me think about your problem, it might be worthwhile to second guess the browser developer at this point, are the pagination properties of css implemented if you have not given your media as being specifically print, I'm betting not, as it might have been easier to implement them if one assumed the developer always had to declare the media as not being screen(the default).

Petr Krenzelok wrote:

>I found the difference - IE, when using borders, still keeps the size > of the rectangle intact and margins of the area are substracted from the > inner area space, otoh Mozilla keeps internal box area intact and border > is drawn outside such box.

Hi John, JU> wow! I answered a question! JU> - still know nothing about rebol :-) :). The great thing here is that we all have different skills. I'm not much help with web-related stuff. By combining our talents, we can all do great things together. -- Gregg

Hi Petr, In PDF, it's something like "/Page", but may need to combine with other things. Not sure. Gabriele might be able to say, since he did PDF-maker. -- Gregg

Hi: I dont know whether a small self-advertisement is permitted on this forum... but here goes ... I've written a utitlity called Simple-PDF that can be used to create PDF files from ascii text. It is a very primitive sort of DTP application. But it has a command-line program also in the same package. It can also split the text to create multi-page PDF files. Download it here: http://www.simplepdf.com/setup2.zip The command-line version is available in Linux also. Regards Sabu Francis P.S: I hope either my mailer, or Ecartis does not insert line-breaks in my post! More than page-breaks, I'm getting irritated by the line-breaks in my own posts :-)

I have my scripts insert this HTML (using CSS): <br style="page-break-after: always" /> It's placed at the start of each "page" after the first "page", using a Rebol script fragment like: First_Page?: true ;... ; Inside page creation loop: either First_Page? [ First_Page?: none ] [ <br style="page-break-after: always" /> ] I also make sure that I use this tag: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd"> for each page, to make sure the MS IE switches into the right mode. If it's not present, MS IE 6 interprets HTML and CSS as if it were an older browser complete with bugs! I also have two different media sections in my .css stylesheet, like: @media screen { body { background: url(Wiki.jpg) #FFFFFC repeat-y fixed; color: #000000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; } .Left-Column { position: absolute; } ... } and @media print { .Left-Column { display: none; } ... } I hope that helps! Andrew J Martin Speaking in tongues and performing miracles. ICQ: 26227169 http://www.rebol.it/Valley/ http://valley.orcon.net.nz/ http://Valley.150m.com/

Hi Gregg, On Friday, December 5, 2003, 6:52:57 PM, you wrote: GI> In PDF, it's something like "/Page", but may need to combine with GI> other things. Not sure. Gabriele might be able to say, since he did GI> PDF-maker. Well, it's not that you can insert page breaks somewhere; a PDF document is made of pages that have some content. So if you wanted to split a page into two you'd have to basically create a new document with two pages and place the content into each of them... not very trivial as the content stream is stateful, so just splitting it up might not work. In conclusions, I don't think I understand what Petr was asking about the PDF version. (That's why I didn't answer before... btw, I've been unable to connect to the Internet since Friday, and I'm a little behind with email etc. now...) Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[g--santilli--tiscalinet--it]> -- REBOL Programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila --- SOON: http://www.rebol.it/