Paper printing html css

Html aimed to paper

[sickmelon]

I have recently had the idea of using css and html documents for paper publishing. I mean, defining the A4 paper layout in the body tag and then goin on with background, boxes, images, tables and so on. The problem is that i can't get the onscreen text proportions when i print on paper or to .ps files. I mean, firefox changes the space between lines and other things, so while onscreen the text fills entirely the page, the printer or the ps file have still some blank space. Do you know any way to print on file or paper as the html document is shown on the screen?
I use win2k and fedora core 3, both with firefox 1

(well, excuse for the bad english and for the fuzzy description of the problem, i'm Italian!)

[limbo]

Welcome to Webmasterworld Sickmelon

Your English seems fine to me ;)

I am doing the same thing today - Well, sort of. Perhaps my approach is not as precise as you would want it. Are you needing to print so precisely for a particular reason? If so I am not sure you will ever be able to get consistent results cross platform & browser. OSX safari is producing very different results for me than Firefox on Win 98. CSS and HTML are just too flexible to get the consistent approach.

You can specify mm's cm's & pt's using css but even then the page will always print differently on differnt hardware.

If you are producing a print version of an content page have you thought about embracing the inherent nature of HTML - let your text flow, use an @ import for you print style sheet and code it for a basic b&w printer.

If you really need a structured & formal layout, PDF (again not ideal) might be a better approach.

[sickmelon]

thanks!

I need to be precise because i'm making a paper only zine, with numbered pages and so on. I was curious if it could be done with HTML CSS, that, in my opinion, would give a modular and structured approach that looks more cool-and-minimal than normal PDF. And, with proper style definition, would give a lot of possibility for the writer of the article to "customize" his article-page. The problem is, from the html onscreen page, making a good .ps or .pdf or whatever file.

I've already used print-aimed measurement, so the layout and the boxes are ok. The problem is that when it comes to print firefox changes text properties like interline, so that even if i fill a page (and with a page i mean a box with the A4 paper dimension) with text, it gets printed with closer line and about a fifth of the page remains blank. And it's not tolerable on, say, an article page.

Probably, lacking specific tools to make html-->ps, i'll only have to try different browsers and see what happens.

[TheDoctor]

I need to be precise

Then CSS is not for you. Pages will print differently by hardware, by browser, etc. I'm all in favour of CSS printing, and I use it a lot, but not where I need to be exact about layout.

Use PDF. That's what it's for.

BTW, your English seems perfect to me.

[sickmelon]

Yes, sadly i'm going to surrender to PDF... But latex is such a bore! And it's more aimed to math-and-order than to easy-desing. The other way is using some WYSIWYG like scribus... Someone suggested me XML but i don't know how it could adapt to paper printing