Well deployed technologies
Pagination and any other aspect of layout, is governed by the various CSS specifications. A few specification are especially relevant for User Agents that wish to provide high quality support for publishing:
- Section in 13 in CSS2 defines the fundamentals of pagination in CSS.
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The CSS Page 3 modules specifies how pages are generated and laid out to hold fragmented content in a paged presentation. It adds functionality for controlling page margins, page size and orientation, and headers and footers, bleed and printer marks, and extends generated content to enable page numbering and running headers/footers. It may become necessary, however, to extend the
@pagefeature to express initial preference over scrolling vs. pagination. -
The CSS Device Adaptation module provides a way for an author to specify, in CSS, the size, zoom factor, and orientation of the viewport that is used as the base for the initial containing block. It may be necessary to extend the
@viewportor of the viewport meta tag to express initial preference over scrolling vs. pagination. - The CSS Fragmentation module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages, columns, or regions. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, and controling (forcing or forbidding) where breaks happen, including widows and orphans.
- Media Queries, Media Queries 4, Media Queries 5 provide authors with features to detect various aspect of the media the document is being rendered in, including whether (and how) it is paginated, or more nuanced questions to tell apart environments like a ebook reader from a print rendition.
- The CSS Generated Content for Paged Media module defines a few features that are useful in paged media, such as footnotes, running headers and footers, and page selectors.
- The CSS Generated Content Module Level 3 module contains a few features that while not exclusive to paged media, are particularly useful in paged media, such as leaders or cross references.
- CSS Page Floats 3 extend the ability of floats to not only go to the beginning or end of the line, but also to float to the top or bottom of pages, columns.
- The CSS Grid 1 module is not specific to paginated media, but is nonetheless noteworthy as it enables advanced layouts often found in print publications.
- The CSS Rhythmic Sizing module contains CSS features for aligning content size to multiple of unit size.
- The CSS Line Grid module contains CSS features for aligning content to a baseline grid.
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The CSS Font 4 module introduces a number of features like
font-stretch,font-synthesis(oblique, which a lot of publishers do in their DTP tools when an italic is not available), OTF, color fonts, variable fonts.
