Indeed. During my troubleshooting, I did run across a bunch of print layout engines using CSS as the input and PDF as the output but I wanted it to be strictly browser-based. I have tested in with Chrome and Firefox on Linux and Chrome on Windows (the target for my original use-case) but am interested in how it works with other people's browser/OS configurations.
Some of the issues that I ran into: 1) All the little margins and padding that get placed everywhere even though you have not specified anything and it is just an "unprintable" and "undisplayed" whitespace in the html drove me nuts. It isn't. Mostly solved by setting font size and line heights to zero on the containing elements and then resetting them to the size you want where you want them. Sometimes solved in a case by case basis by html commenting out whitespace. It weirdly works. 2) Also, there is a little bit of margin around the html body element that causes a weird margin at the top (screwing up your pagination on the first page only) and at the end (giving you an random extra page on templates that fill up the top to bottom space like tent cards). I had to force that to zero in the @media print rule. 3) @page rule is a wonderful concept for printing that is largely ignored in Chrome. Chrome depends on manual print page margin setting which makes it great for over-riding crappy print layouts but makes it impossible to make things completely automatic. I got to the point where only the top margin setting is needed and the rest should be zero. If you set all the manual margins to zero in Firefox, the @page top margin is respected and things line up automatically. I wanted to fake this using and n-up layout within TiddlyWiki but could not figure out how or if it can process n list items at a time. 4) I would have liked to have some automatic resizing/scaling of fonts to fit each unit div but apparently that does not exist unless you hack it up by iterating with javascript which is beyond my skill-set. My first attempt as squeezing text in was to use the "condensed" version of a font but whether the font that a browser chooses has a condensed variant is hit or miss even with the same font-family specification. I ended up just squeezing by changing the font size on the line that was assumed the biggest but what is done with that checkmark is template specific. This might turn into a slider or a +/- button in the future to allow some fine tuning. Anyways, thanks for checking it out. /Mike On Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 5:28:06 AM UTC-4, @TiddlyTweeter wrote: > > The Label tool got my interest in that its trying to deal with the > somewhat complicated problem of getting printers to behave using CSS. This > is important if you need to strictly control print layouts. > > I'm not sure its entirely successful as a generalisable approach. But its > a hell of a lot better and illustrative than most anything I have seen in > TW so far. Must have been a lot of work? > > FYI, a useful resource on learning about and addressing print issues from > HTML pages in a CSS driven way is the PRINCE system > https://www.princexml.com/. Prince aims to bring to utilisation of CSS > for document printing exact, cross-browser repeatable layout. > > Best wishes > Josiah > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/031ca6f1-ea5a-489a-9e2c-cf663d68d40f%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
