Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ECS] html ff's Ingo Pakleppa Sat, 31 Oct 1998 14:21:07 -0800

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Easy answer: you don't. The whole point of HTML is that you don't provide
any actual formatting in it, but rather information about the content - for
instance, <p> and <\p> means "this starts/ends a paragraph" (which is
mostly a conceptual concept). It's then up to the HTML viewer (aka,
browser) to decide what that means - whether to start a new line, whether
to insert a blank line, etc. Furthermore, it's quite well possible that
different browsers may use different font sizes (for instance, I set mine
to use twice the usual font size because I have a good high resolution
monitor, and the regular font size is too small). So page breaks that
worked on your particular printer and browser settings wouldn't even work
on somebody else's.

Quote from http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html: "Remember: you
cannot guarantee that your document will appear to other people exactly as
it does to you."

Page usually does not have any conceptual equivalent, so HTML does not
provide for page breaks. Beyond paragraph, the next type of structure HTML
would provide is headings. Above that, you'd split the file into multiple
linked HTML files - obviously, that does provide for page breaks (but you'd
have to print the file separately). New file = new page. That (besides the
size of the HTML file) is the reason Web sites are broken into individual
pages.

You may also want to look at horizontal dividers (the <HR> tag).

Incidentally, similarly you are supposed to use tags like "emphasis"
"strong" and "citation" instead of "italic" "bold" and "underlined" - the
browser is supposed but not required to use italics for emphasis and
citation, and bold for strong.

Another thought: I'm not sure you should even cater too much to people who
want to print, in the age of online documentation. If somebody wants to
read printed documentation, it's much better to let him print only the one
chapter he's interested in, rather than forcing him to print one huge HTML
file. So I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the HTML documentation
(maybe you could put it up on your Web site, too?) and adding links between
the files.

Ingo

At 08:01 AM 10/31/98 -0800, Mark Gilmore wrote:
>Does anyone know how to make "page-breaks" in HTML
>(to generate form-feeds when printing) ?
>If not, how does one support paging ? Thanks
>-- 
>Mark Gilmore
>Omnipotence
>http://members.a2zsol.com/omnipotence.html
>
>--
>Please, turn off HTML (fancy colours, fonts, etc) when sending message to
list.
>To unsubscribe, e-mail: ecs-list-unsubscribe@vancouver.ml.org

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| Ingo Pakleppa            mailto:ipakleppa@ecs.com              |
| Microsoft Certified Professional + Internet                    |
| Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer                           |
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