So what I'm trying to do is to create a "print version" page which grabs the content from an external page, loads it in, and formats it to be printed.

So it'll be something like this:



However, the problem is the actual "splitting" of the page. Each div must continue where the previous one left off, but I don't know of any way to detect that. Also note that the pages aren't neccesarilly all text; they may contain images and tables.

Any ideas?

use a print style sheet and the :before & :after pseudo elements.

Nice, that's a better way to add the headers and footers than I was using. I never heard of those psuedo-elements. However, still, I don't think you can use those to format the individual pages; you can only use them to format block elements. A header and a footer needs to be added to each printed page, not just the top and bottom of the entire print preview. However, if there is a way to format the individual print pages, please let me know. That would make this task a million times easier.

Here's really the main problem I'm having trouble with:



I'm not even sure if that's possible in any way. (Note, this may be a problem that is more suited for some different forum... I don't know, maybe javascript or something has some way to do this. I just threw it in here, because I initially thought it was most suited for the CSS forum)

There's a simple answer to that.

No chance

Not clientside anyway, there is no event that occurs as the content overflows.

Well possibly, it could be done but it would be slow and fraught with all kinds of potential problems and pitfalls.

You could use somthing like a PHP or JS string trunication script however it would be difficult to work with line breaks.

Alternativly maybe you can work with JS getting the height of a div and trunicating more text until the div is equal to or less than the desired size.

However as Chris is saying, methods such as these or otherwise, will be bulky and not particually nice.

"Alternativly maybe you can work with JS getting the height of a div and trunicating more text until the div is equal to or less than the desired size."

Regardless of the fact that it'd be really inefficient, that does sounds like it'd work. Though, I think in the end, I'll probably just do away with the headers and footers altogether. :P

Thanks for all the input. Glad to know that it's pretty much impossible, so I don't keep sitting here frying my mind trying to figure this out.

Nothing is impossible (within reason :P ) its just striking the ballence between the work involved to the reward/benifit.