Online Output: extra page when printing workaround?

[kel322]

I know I've seen this mentioned somewhere in the forums, but I can't seem to find it.

When clicking the print button from an online output, I know that it pulls from the print part of the stylesheet if you have one. We have one, and we have a page-break-before:always set for the h1 tag. This means that when we print from the online output, there is always a blank page before the content. Has anyone come up with any kind of workaround for this?

Thanks

[Nita Beck]

My solution may be much bigger than you need.

My authoring practice is NOT to use the print medium for my print output (targets). I reserve the print medium for the exact use case you cite, that being how a page in online output will be formatted when printed from a browser. For my print output, I create a custom medium, naming it something like PDF or PrintPub. I use that custom medium exclusively for formatting the print output; it'll have no effect on online pages printed from a browser.

My print medium is likely to have only a few things defined it in, such as -- assuming that the font color for my online pages is not black -- to set the color to black, so we'll get a nice, crisp printout. I won't generally do anything with page breaks in the print medium.

On the other hand, my PDF or PrintPub medium will have a TON of stuff in it -- auto-numbering, xref formats, heading numbering, figure and table title formatting and numbering, as well as controlling column-, frame-, and page-breaking, hyphenation, short-line, widows, orphans, letter spacing, etc. -- all the kinds of things one is interested in for print documentation.

HTH

[kel322]

Hi Nita,
Thank you. That does help immensely; I didn't realize that you could create a custom medium, so this opens a whole new path (can of worms? ) for me.

Thanks!
Kelly

[davidgolden99]

Hi Nita,

I'm in the same situation. We have a breadcrumb trail and a print button. When the user clicks the print button, the breadcrumb prints on the first page and the content starts on the next page. Could you share what you're putting in your print media query?

I went into our print medium and added this:

Code: Select all

	MadCap|breadcrumbsProxy /* no page break when printing web site */
	{
		page-break-after: avoid;
	}

but it does not affect the output from the print button. (It does work when I print from the menu command.)

Thanks,
Dave