Controlling CSS page breaks when printing in Webkit

Question

I'm attempting to improve the appearance of html documents printed using Webkit, in this case by exerting some control over where page breaks occur.

I'm able to insert page breaks where I need using:

page-break-after: always; 

However, I can't find a way to avoid page breaks being inserted in the middle of items. For example, I have html tables that should not be split in the middle across multiple pages. I had the impression that

page-break-inside: avoid;

would prevent a page break from being inserted inside the element, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. My code looks like:

.dontsplit { border: 2px solid black; page-break-inside: avoid; }

<table class="dontsplit">
    <tr><td>Some title</td></tr>
    <tr><td><img src="something.jpg"></td></tr>
</table>

Despite the page-break-inside: avoid directive I still get the table split between the first and second row into separate pages.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Downloaded a recent binary of wkhtmltopdf http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/, and the following seems to work.

.dontsplit { border: 2px solid black; page-break-inside: avoid; }

<table>
  <tr><td><div class="dontsplit">Some title</div></td></tr>
  <tr><td><div class="dontsplit"><img src="something.jpg"></div></td></tr>
</table>

reference: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=9#c21

Prudent to put margin, and padding to zero on the td, and place any on the div, otherwise you'll get "edges" making it over the folds

Answer 2

As cliffordlife states,

.dontsplit { border: 2px solid black; page-break-inside: avoid; }

will work. But not for firefox. In firefox, what you are going to have to do is check for the height and then add page-break-after: always; when it is relevant.

On average, the margin will be 1 inch on top and bottom. So, to measure how many pixels a 10 inch page would consume, I used this:

var pageOfPixels;
(function(){
    var d = document.createElement("div");
    d.setAttribute("style", "height:9in;position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;z-index:-5;");
    document.body.appendChild(d);
    pageOfPixels = $(d).height();
    d.parentNode.removeChild(d);
})();

I had a lot of divs each with a lot of paragraphs in them. So what I did was I iterated through them, and then compared the current height of the them on the current page to the pageOfPixels value.

var currentPosition = 0;
$('.printDiv').each(function (index, element) {
    var h = $(this).height();
    if (currentPosition + h > pageOfPixels) {
        //add page break
        $('.printDiv').eq(index - 1).css("page-break-after", "always");
        currentPosition = h;
    } else {
        currentPosition += h;
    }
});

This worked for me in firefox.