Printing reports on client's printer

Anon

Dear friends,
I have a problem.
I need to print a report on client's printer and don't know how to do it in PHP (javascript or something else would be OK too). For one page it is easy, but if I have more pages, I need to print header and footer on each page. Header consists of picture (company logo)and little table (one or two rows).
Problem would be easy solvable if there would be a PHP function which could determine end of "printed" page.
If You can help with this or You have some other idea please respond.
Thanks!

theslinky

Well, this is a real pickle because depending on what browse you use, page "delimeters" can be different.

It all depends on the resolution the browser displays in.

What I would do is find out what browse the client is running, and download that browser. Then create a simple HTML template with a table. Maximize the table until is perfectly fits in one page. Then note this width and height of the table and print all your contents in tables (without the border so they don't know it's a table).

Also, resolutions within browsers may not be the same on different operating systems.

Also, if formatting is really a BIG issue, then considering using pdflib or cpdf to generate PDF reports. THis way you can eliminate the worries of finding out perfect resolutions. But then you'll have to experiment with PDF and learn all the functions to generate your reports.

if you reports contain only simple flowing text and tables, then using PDF wouldn't be too much of a pain... but if you get into advanced formatting and images, etc, then you may find yourself having to learn and experiment a lot.

-sridhar

Anon

Yes,
there are many parameters that influence client printing, but my application will not work for unknown browsers. I could choose one to work with (with some standard resolution 800x600 for instance, or 1024x768).
It is not a problem. I have picture only in header (company logo) and all details are represented by table rows (simple text).
This is a problem!
I should print column header(No, Product Name, Quantity,...),as part of page header and query results under.
As You can see, some of these values can be variable height (Product Name for instance can occupy more than one row on printed page), so I don't know how many rows will fill printed page (after which I would print header again on printer friendly page). That is the problem.
In another hand I should use pdf classes for PHP. As I understood this method every time when client wants to print, server would send pdf file to client. This is not quite elegant solution. I am not a PHP expert, but I am not a beginner too, and I can't believe that there is not an easy and elegant solution for this nice and elegant language.