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

In your CSS you can set the @page property as shown below.

@media print{@page {size: landscape}}

The @page is part of CSS 2.1 specification however this size is not as highlighted by the answer to the question Is @Page { size:landscape} obsolete?:

CSS 2.1 no longer specifies the size attribute. The current working draft for CSS3 Paged Media module does specify it (but this is not standard or accepted).

As stated the size option comes from the CSS 3 Draft Specification. In theory it can be set to both a page size and orientation although in my sample the size is omitted.

The support is very mixed with a bug report begin filed in firefox, most browsers do not support it.

It may seem to work in IE7 but this is because IE7 will remember the users last selection of landscape or portrait in print preview (only the browser is re-started).

This article does have some suggested work arounds using JavaScript or ActiveX that send keys to the users browser although it they are not ideal and rely on changing the browsers security settings.

Alternately you could rotate the content rather than the page orientation. This can be done by creating a style and applying it to the body that includes these two lines but this also has draw backs creating many alignment and layout issues.

<style type="text/css" media="print">
    .page
    {
     -webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); 
     -moz-transform:rotate(-90deg);
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);
    }
</style>

The final alternative I have found is to create a landscape version in a PDF. You can point to so when the user selects print it prints the PDF. However I could not get this to auto print work in IE7.

<link media="print" rel="Alternate" href="print.pdf">

In conclusion in some browsers it is relativity easy using the @page size option however in many browsers there is no sure way and it would depend on your content and environment. This maybe why Google Documents creates a PDF when print is selected and then allows the user to open and print that.

Answer 2

You can also use the non-standard IE-only css attribute writing-mode

div.page    { 
   writing-mode: tb-rl;
}

Answer 3

The size property is what you're after as mentioned. To set both the the orientation and size of your page when printing, you could use the following:

/* ISO Paper Size */
@page {
  size: A4 landscape;
}

/* Size in mm */    
@page {
  size: 100mm 200mm landscape;
}

/* Size in inches */    
@page {
  size: 4in 6in landscape;
}

Here's a link to the @page documentation.

Answer 4

Try to add this your CSS:

@page {
  size: landscape;
}

Answer 5

I tried to solve this problem once, but all my research led me towards ActiveX controls/plug-ins. There is no trick that the browsers (3 years ago anyway) permitted to change any print settings (number of copies, paper size).

I put my efforts into warning the user carefully that they needed to select "landscape" when the browsers print dialog appeared. I also created a "print preview" page, which worked much better than IE6's did! Our application had very wide tables of data in some reports, and the print preview made it clear to the users when the table would spill off the right-edge of the paper (since IE6 couldnt cope with printing on 2 sheets either).

And yes, people are still using IE6 even now.

Answer 6

<style type="text/css" media="print">
.landscape { 
    width: 100%; 
    height: 100%; 
    margin: 0% 0% 0% 0%; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(Rotation=1); 
} 
</style>

If you want this style to be applied to a table then create one div tag with this style class and add the table tag within this div tag and close the div tag at the end.

This table will only print in landscape and all other pages will print in portrait mode only. But the problem is if the table size is more than the page width then we may loose some of the rows and sometimes headers also are missed. Be careful.

Have a good day.

Thank you, Naveen Mettapally.