[FX.php List] [OFF] printable very wide table?

[Dale Bengston]

Hi Joel,

I'm not sure what your objective is - to get it all to fit on a single page widthwise and "flow" down, or to print it on multiple pages across and down. If it's the former, you can do this by changing the browser's print settings to do a "shrink to fit." This works differently in all browsers, so beware of differences. In fact, most printing settings are browser- or OS-specific (print setup), so getting stuff to work consistently is a big, frustrating drag.

One thing that does work is specifying a different style sheet for screen and print. This allows you to do cool things like suppressing your navigation buttons for printing, and shifting all elements to black and white. There are a few print-only CSS attributes as well, but they're not widely supported. (In fact, Firefox 3.6.12 - Mac and Windows - just magically started supporting page break CSS.) If you're just printing a big ol' HTML table, it will break across pages pretty well without much intervention.

Here's an overview of media types supported in CSS:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html

Hope this helps,
Dale



On Dec 10, 2010, at 5:41 PM, Joel Shapiro wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> I've got a request to have a printable web page that would be a potentially _very_ wide table (data coming from FM).
> 
> I've suggested to the client that instead we create an excel spreadsheet from the data so users can print from Excel, but the client doesn't want that.
> 
> In FMP, the client is thinking they could create a layout w/ all text rotated 90 degrees, so the "width" could be indefinite as it runs from one page to the next.  I've done a quick test of CSS transform:rotate and that's not gonna work well for the web page.
> 
> I'm thinking of outputting to PDF, making sure the row height is consistent across all pages, so a user could line up the pages after they've printed...  but thought I'd check in here to see if anybody's got any thoughts or suggestions.
> 
> TIA,
> -Joel
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Joel Shapiro
> FileMaker Pro
> database & web design
> http://www.jsfmp.com
> 415-269-5055
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> _______________________________________________
> FX.php_List mailing list
> FX.php_List at mail.iviking.org
> http://www.iviking.org/mailman/listinfo/fx.php_list