Landscape printing from HTML

Question

I have a HTML report, which needs to be printed landscape because of the many columns. It there a way to do this, without the user having to change the document settings?

And what are the options amongst browsers.

Answer 1

This also worked for me:

@media print and (orientation:landscape) { … }

Answer 2

-webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); -moz-transform:rotate(-90deg);
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);

not working in Firefox 16.0.2 but it is working in Chrome

Answer 3

Quoted from CSS-Discuss Wiki

The @page rule has been cut down in scope from CSS2 to CSS2.1. The full CSS2 @page rule was reportedly implemented only in Opera (and buggily even then). My own testing shows that IE and Firefox don't support @page at all. According to the now-obsolescent CSS2 spec section 13.2.2 it is possible to override the user's setting of orientation and (for example) force printing in Landscape but the relevant "size" property has been dropped from CSS2.1, consistent with the fact that no current browser supports it. It has been reinstated in the CSS3 Paged Media module but note that this is only a Working Draft (as at July 2009).

Conclusion: forget about @page for the present. If you feel your document needs to be printed in Landscape orientation, ask yourself if you can instead make your design more fluid. If you really can't (perhaps because the document contains data tables with many columns, for example), you will need to advise the user to set the orientation to Landscape and perhaps outline how to do it in the most common browsers. Of course, some browsers have a print fit-to-width (shrink-to-fit) feature (e.g. Opera, Firefox, IE7) but it's inadvisable to rely on users having this facility or having it switched on.

Answer 4

I created a blank MS Document with Landscape setting and then opened it in notepad. Copied and pasted the following to my html page

<style type="text/css" media="print">
   @page Section1
    {size:11 8.5in;
    margin:.5in 13.6pt 0in 13.6pt;
    mso-header-margin:.5in;
    mso-footer-margin:.5in;
    mso-paper-source:4;}
div.Section1
    {page:Section1;}
</style>



<div class="Section1"> put  text / images / other stuff  </div>

The print preview shows the pages in a landscape size. This seems to be working fine on IE and Chrome, not tested on FF.

Answer 5

My solution:

<style type="text/css" media="print">
    @page { 
        size: landscape;
    }
    body { 
        writing-mode: tb-rl;
    }
</style>

This works in IE, Firefox and Chrome

Answer 6

It's not enough just to rotate the page content. Here is a right CSS which work in the most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE9+).

First set body margin to 0, because otherwise page margins will be larger than those you set in the print dialog. Also set background color to visualize pages.

body {
  margin: 0;
  background: #CCCCCC;
}

margin, border and background are required to visualize pages.

padding must be set to the required print margin. In the print dialog you must set the same margins (10mm in this example).

div.portrait, div.landscape {
  margin: 10px auto;
  padding: 10mm;
  border: solid 1px black;
  overflow: hidden;
  page-break-after: always;
  background: white;
}

The size of A4 page is 210mm x 297mm. You need to subtract print margins from the size. And set the size of page's content:

div.portrait {
  width: 190mm;
  height: 276mm;
}
div.landscape {
  width: 276mm;
  height: 190mm;
}

I use 276mm instead of 277mm, because different browsers scale pages a little bit differently. So some of them will print 277mm-height content on two pages. The second page will be empty. It's more safe to use 276mm.

We don't need any margin, border, padding, background on the printed page, so remove them:

@media print {
  body {
    background: none;
    -ms-zoom: 1.665;
  }
  div.portrait, div.landscape {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: none;
    background: none;
  }
  div.landscape {
    transform: rotate(270deg) translate(-276mm, 0);
    transform-origin: 0 0;
  }
}

Note that the origin of transformation is 0 0! Also the content of landscape pages must be moved 276mm down!

Also if you have a mix of portrait and lanscape pages IE will zoom out the pages. We fix it by setting -ms-zoom to 1.665. If you'll set it to 1.6666 or something like this the right border of the page content may be cropped sometimes.

If you need IE8- or other old browsers support you can use -webkit-transform, -moz-transform, filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3). But for modern enough browsers it's not required.