Hello all. I’ve scoured the web a few times over and seen that Gecko-based browsers have issues with my quick-and-dirty approach using mixed relative/absolute positioning and page-break-before;always. It works only in MSIE 7, but while that is mostly an embarrassment, it was an accepted temporary compromise to meet a deadline.
My page is an attempt at a printer-friendly view of two OMB forms; one form is page one and the other is an attachment, of which there could be hundreds. The application generating the output is Oracle PL/SQL, with no tools in place to generate a line-drawn “paper” form. The forms are available as PDF from the two links below. The compromise implemented was to convert the PDFs to images and use CSS to position the text that fills the forms’ fields.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/grants_forms/ff_report_fill.pdf
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/grants/standard_forms/ffr_attachment.pdf
My approach involved a parent div for each page, and separate css for screen and print media. This div uses relative positioning based on the image sizes so the output webpage was readable. Within each page, the form image and fields are child divs using absolute positioning. I cannot get away from absolute because of the poor design of the OMB form (the line pitch for fields is not constant). That’s about it; repeating pages/fields that go only two divs deep.
Because this approach requires that each new page be offset from the prior, I’m generating a style section with separate classes for each page in the html document.
Looking at the forms I linked to should give an understanding of the problem. I can host a sample page upon request if anyone wants to see the interim solution.
It needs a redesign to support at a minimum Firefox and Safari. But we don’t control (usually) control the browser selection of our customers.
Many thanks in advance for your time and consideration.