OsakaWebbie
Programmer
After trying to get output that satisfied me by taking custom HTML/CSS code from the browser into Word for final processing, and being told by the Microsoft:Office forum that I was trying to make Word do the job of a browser (see thread68-1113848), now I'm probably going to be accused of trying to make CSS and HTML do the job of a word processor, but I'll have to take my chances.
Since the time of the above-cited thread, I have learned how to get better performance out of Word (save the generated web page, then in Word, insert it as a file - it gets much more of the CSS right than just pasting), but now I have added a feature to my content that I think is truly impossible for Word to handle: chords above lines of song lyrics (see thread215-1206604). So now I'm focusing on getting the layout in the browser good enough to print directly. I have even developed a way to "edit" the content as necessary to prepare it for printing (using Javascript, the DOM, and a big textbox in a popup window).
But in some cases I would want two-column output. The first thing I discovered is that although the CSS property column-count is mentioned as early as 2001 (in a document about a proposed CSS3 that apparently never materialized), only Firefox 1.5 seems to have implemented a version of it (well, I don't know about less common browsers, but IE definitely doesn't have a clue). Okay, so I force my users who want 2 columns to use Firefox - not perfect, but I can live with that. (If you know how to make multiple columns work in IE, I'm all ears, but otherwise, I guess I'll just look at it as an excuse to promote Firefox!) But then I discovered that my carefully planned page-break-before properties for my different elements don't work with columns, only with pages. Is there any way to control the breaks for flowing content in columns? The whole purpose of this particular piece of code (dynamically generated from database data) is for it to be printed, so I don't really care if it doesn't display correctly in the regular browser view, as long as the print preview window (and the printed page, of course) get it right. And although the column-count property is easy, if there is a more complex way to accomplish this that opens up the way for controlling the column breaks and/or be more cross-browser compatible, I don't mind working at it.
Since the time of the above-cited thread, I have learned how to get better performance out of Word (save the generated web page, then in Word, insert it as a file - it gets much more of the CSS right than just pasting), but now I have added a feature to my content that I think is truly impossible for Word to handle: chords above lines of song lyrics (see thread215-1206604). So now I'm focusing on getting the layout in the browser good enough to print directly. I have even developed a way to "edit" the content as necessary to prepare it for printing (using Javascript, the DOM, and a big textbox in a popup window).
But in some cases I would want two-column output. The first thing I discovered is that although the CSS property column-count is mentioned as early as 2001 (in a document about a proposed CSS3 that apparently never materialized), only Firefox 1.5 seems to have implemented a version of it (well, I don't know about less common browsers, but IE definitely doesn't have a clue). Okay, so I force my users who want 2 columns to use Firefox - not perfect, but I can live with that. (If you know how to make multiple columns work in IE, I'm all ears, but otherwise, I guess I'll just look at it as an excuse to promote Firefox!) But then I discovered that my carefully planned page-break-before properties for my different elements don't work with columns, only with pages. Is there any way to control the breaks for flowing content in columns? The whole purpose of this particular piece of code (dynamically generated from database data) is for it to be printed, so I don't really care if it doesn't display correctly in the regular browser view, as long as the print preview window (and the printed page, of course) get it right. And although the column-count property is easy, if there is a more complex way to accomplish this that opens up the way for controlling the column breaks and/or be more cross-browser compatible, I don't mind working at it.