Paper CSS for happy printing

Front-end printing solution - previewable and live-reloadable!

Recently, we say "front-end" every day. Then why don't we make the printing documents in front-end? We believe we can make it perfectly without back-end. Paper CSS is just a small snippet of CSS, but it helps us create them in browser easily.

Installation
Basic Usage
Live Preview
PDF Generation
Why Paper CSS?
License

Installation

Get Paper CSS from cdnjs (recommended):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/paper-css/0.3.0/paper.css">

Or download paper.css file from GitHub manually, or via npm:

$ npm install paper-css

Basic Usage

Load paper-css into <head> like this:

<!-- Load paper.css for happy printing -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dist/paper.css">

<!-- Set page size here: A5, A4 or A3 -->
<!-- Set also "landscape" if you need -->
<style>@page { size: A5 }</style>

Set the class of <body> and also set "sheet" for each sheet.

<!-- Set "A5", "A4" or "A3" for class name -->
<!-- Set also "landscape" if you need -->
<body class="A5">

  <!-- Each sheet element should have the class "sheet" -->
  <!-- "padding-**mm" is optional: you can set 10, 15, 20 or 25 -->
  <section class="sheet padding-10mm">

    <!-- Write HTML just like a web page -->
    <article>This is an A5 document.</article>

  </section>

</body>

All available page sizes is listed below:

A5, A5 landscape
A4, A4 landscape
A3, A3 landscape
letter, letter landscape
legal, legal landscape

Live Preview

Install live-server:

$ npm install --global live-server

Then, preview your HTML file:

$ live-server your-document.html

Your browser will open the document. And the browser will automatically reload the page when changes are detected.

See more detail and all options here.

PDF Generation

Install electron-pdf:

$ npm install --global electron-pdf

Then, generate a PDF file from your HTML file:

$ electron-pdf your-document.html your-document.pdf

See more details and all options here.

Note: we used to provide a small CLI tool paper-css while v0.2.x, we've dropped it in favor of electron-pdf which is a better option to do the same, basically.

Why Paper CSS?

Previewable

You can check the design and layout before printing. See the browser like when you build a web page.

This example could be printed like this.

Live-reloading

It's just HTML/CSS, so we can edit it with live-reloading. See Live Preview section above.

Comparisons

type	expression	learning cost	editable	in-browser	multipage
HTML	Enough	already known	No	OK	~100 pages *
SVG	Enough	not so difficult	No	OK
PDF	Perfect	difficult	No	NG	no limit **
Excel	Not cool	sigh	Yes	NG	uncontrollable

* It depends on user's environment. ** Only if you have huge memory on the server.

MBA76/paper-css