CSS Page-Break Not Working in all Browsers

Richard Parnaby-King picture Richard Parnaby-King · Feb 3, 2011 · Viewed 91.8k times · Source

I'm having trouble getting this working in most browsers, except for IE (it even works correctly in IE6) and Opera.

Firefox separates the divs correctly but only prints the first page.

Chrome and Safari only applies the page break to the last div.

How can I get this working across all browsers correctly?

The HTML:

<div id="leftNav">
  <ul>
    <!--links etc-->
  </ul>
</div>
<div id="mainBody">
 <div id="container">
  <div class="pageBreak">
   <!--content-->
  </div>
  <div class="pageBreak">
   <!--content-->
  </div>
  <div class="pageBreak">
   <!--content-->
  </div>
 </div>
</div>

The divs with the IDs #leftNav and #mainBody are are set to float:left, so they display nicely.

I only want to print the .pageBreak classes, hiding the #leftNav and the rest of the #mainBody with CSS.

The CSS:

@media print
{
 #leftNav
 {
  display:none;
 }
 #mainBody
 {
  border:none;
  margin:none;
  padding:none;
 }
}

Answer

Richard Parnaby-King picture Richard Parnaby-King · Mar 15, 2011

Parent elements can not have float on them.

Setting float:none on all parent elements makes page-break-before:always work correctly.

Other things that can break page-break are:

  • using page-break inside tables
  • floating elements
  • inline-block elements
  • block elements with borders