count the lines on the fly generated from a php report

[tamayo]

Hi, I'm writing an app, all my reports were coded from scratch, they are a mix of html+php, I have an issue when the reports have more than 1 page, at this time the page break are controlled by the printer, but some times the result are not well, for example the first page ends with:

cheers
Mr. Peter Pan

and in the second page only print this:

Never Land inc.

how to fix this?
so my questions are:

1. if the report doesn't fix in one single page, i think i can use the css tag before-page-break but how can I guess which are the last 8 lines, then send page-break and those 8 lines will printed in page 2?

2. is there a way to know how many lines my report has? all my data is taken from the DB, so here it is an example:

	if(strlen(trim($rsrptverlev['actmanpac']))!=0){
	echo ". Actividad Manual: " . $rsrptverlev['actmanpac']  ;
		}				

if(strlen(trim($rsrptverlev['escpac']))!=0){
echo ". Escolaridad: " . $rsrptverlev['escpac'] ;
	}						

if(strlen(trim($rsrptverlev['ocupac']))!=0){
echo ". Ocupacion: " . $rsrptverlev['ocupac']  ;
	}						

thinking that $rsrptverlev['ocupac'] has 30 lines, is there a way to send the last 10 lines to another page?

3. is there any other way to do this?

regards

[sfullman]

I think you have almost no way to control page breaks other than CSS.

This is because you have no control over margins on the printers, user font size or page orientation. You could do some calculations as far as line height and use the server side (PHP) to output a page-break-after command as you specified, but I doubt you can control it perfectly in all cases.

printing invoices for example, you may have multiple orders in a table. In this case, use a <thead> tag, then use <th> tags instead of <td> tags - reason is because on most browser/printers, the header will repeat on the 2nd page - this can be helpful with headings on tabular data spanning more than one page.

I believe there are ways to use pseudo-classes to repeat certain other elements over multiple pages, but you'll have to research that. I hope this helps some.