Creating Page-Breaks In CFDocument Without Using CFDocumentItem In Lucee CFML 5.3.7.47
The other day, I was experimenting with the SrcFile attribute on the CFDocument tag as a means to pre-generate the HTML source for a PDF. Normally, when generating a PDF, I would just inline the CFML code inside the CFDocument tag-body; and, I'd use the CFDocumentItem tag with type="pagebreak" to create page-breaks. Which begs the question: if I'm using an externalized HTML source file, how do I create page-breaks? It turns out, since the CFDocument tag supports some CSS, we can use the page-break-before property to generate page-breaks without the CFDocumentItem tag in Lucee CFML 5.3.7.47.
To see this in action, I've created a simple CFDocument tag instance that renders three separate pages. Note that I have a <style> tag in my document head that defines this CSS style-block:
| <style type="text/css"> | |
| div.start-on-new-page { | |
| page-break-before: always ; | |
| } | |
| </style> |
Now, I can apply the CSS class name, start-on-new-page, to any div element to force that content to start on a new page:
| <cfdocument | |
| format="pdf" | |
| filename="./document.pdf" | |
| overwrite="true"> | |
| <!doctype html> | |
| <html lang="en"> | |
| <head> | |
| <meta charset="utf-8" /> | |
| <title> | |
| CFDocument: Generating Page-Breaks Without CFDocumentItem | |
| </title> | |
| <!--- | |
| Even though we aren't using CFDocumentItem[type=pagebreak], the CFDocument | |
| tag can generate page-breaks using the CSS property: "page-break-before". | |
| If we add this at the start of a "section", that section will begin on a | |
| new page of the PDF. | |
| ---> | |
| <style type="text/css"> | |
| div.start-on-new-page { | |
| page-break-before: always ; | |
| } | |
| </style> | |
| </head> | |
| <body id="pageOne"> | |
| <h1> | |
| CFDocument: Generating Page-Breaks Without CFDocumentItem | |
| </h1> | |
| <ul> | |
| <li> | |
| <a href="#pageTwo">Page Two</a> | |
| </li> | |
| <li> | |
| <a href="#pageThree">Page Three</a> | |
| </li> | |
| </ul> | |
| <div id="pageTwo" class="start-on-new-page"> | |
| <h2> | |
| Page Two | |
| </h2> | |
| <p> | |
| I am page two, woot woot! | |
| Continue on to <a href="#pageThree">Page Three</a>. | |
| </p> | |
| </div> | |
| <div id="pageThree" class="start-on-new-page"> | |
| <h2> | |
| Page Three | |
| </h2> | |
| <p> | |
| I am page three, tee hee hee! | |
| Jump back up to <a href="#pageOne">the top</a>. | |
| </p> | |
| </div> | |
| </body> | |
| </html> | |
| </cfdocument> |
As you can see, page Two and page Three are each contained within a div.start-on-new-page element. And, when we generate this PDF, we get the following experience:
Easy peasy! Thanks to the page-break-before CSS property, each section in this CFDocument PDF starts on a new page. This will make it possible for me to pre-generate HTML files with granular control even without the CFDocumentItem tag in Lucee CFML 5.3.7.47.
Want to use code from this post? Check out the license.
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