I stopped trying to make HTML paginate for printing (and it finally worked)

Victorien Dussart — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:56:12 +0000

For several months, I struggled with a problem many developers are familiar with:
printing HTML content correctly across multiple pages without breaking the layout.

Like many others, I tried the usual approaches:

CSS page-break-*
@print media queries
headless browsers
HTML → PDF generators

They work… up to a point.

As soon as the content becomes even slightly complex, dynamic, or editable, everything starts to break down: unpredictable page breaks, truncated elements, inconsistent margins, widows and orphans everywhere.

The underlying problem

In hindsight, the real issue wasn’t CSS.

The problem is that HTML was never designed to be paginated.
We try to force a rendering engine built for continuous flow to produce something discrete and deterministic. Inevitably, it fails.

The turning point

At some point, I stopped trying to “convince” HTML to paginate properly.

Instead of cutting the content, I inverted the reasoning:
what if each page were simply a window onto a larger, continuous piece of content?

That’s when I separated two responsibilities that are often tightly coupled:

content rendering
pagination
A different approach

Concretely, the idea is to create a logical A4 page in CSS that acts as a window onto a larger HTML document, and then clone that page as many times as needed.

Each page dynamically displays a different portion of the same content using vertical offsets, creating the illusion of a unified multipage document.

The content is never “broken” or arbitrarily split:
it is simply observed through successive windows, whose size and surrounding metadata can be fully controlled.

What you see on screen is not exactly what gets printed — and that is intentional.

What this changes

This separation enables:
stable and predictable multipage output
documents that remain fully editable before printing
deterministic pagination, even with complex content

The implementation is intentionally simple from a technology standpoint (plain vanilla JavaScript), but it relies on a fundamentally different way of approaching the problem.

See results by clicking here.

PS: Please note that this approach is covered by a patent. I prefer to clarify this upfront to avoid any confusion regarding its exploitation.

Forem: Victorien Dussart

I stopped trying to make HTML paginate for printing (and it finally worked)