controlling / detecting print sizes

[csillag]

I am not sure SmartGWT can do a lot about this, so this might be slightly off-topic, but here are the questions anyway:

When I want to print something,

1. what can I do to make it fit to the page? How can I influence the sizes?

2. When the content is too large for one page, how can I break it up to smaller pieces, so that it can be printed to multiple sheets?

3. One step weaker than actually incluencing it, how can I detect the estimated size of the printed content?

What are the best practices about these issues?

Thank you for your help.

[svjard]

For 2) there are CSS attributes to allow this namely 'page-break-[before|after|inside]' that will force printers to not chop elements. But even these are not correctly obeyed by all browsers.

For 1,3) that is a tricky, since the standard doesn't necessarily force printers in certain situations to obey rules, but generally sites will have a print.css and media.css. Having specific sizes generally is for media, percentages are for print, so for example if you had a grid which you set to x pixels it would be 100% in the print css. There are some documented best fonts, sizes, colors, etc... to use for print out there, but no silver bullet for sure (especially IE6).