cfml

When using &lt;cfdocument format="PDF" how do you make pagebreaks gracefully when outputting data in a pdf?

If it was just single rows of data I guess I could get a count  of the rows and force a pagebreak after so many rows. But the data outputted wraps into multiple lines.

been a bit since I wrote a PDF report with breaks but I seem to remember that what I ended up with was a div like this:
```&lt;div style="page-break-before:always"&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/div&gt; ```
and occasionally using:
```&lt;cfdocumentitem type="pagebreak"/&gt;```
Again, been a minute, but those seemed to work. Something to keep in mind is to make sure your HTML is valid. If something in your loop messes up your HTML (doesn't close a tag properly, invalid table structure, etc) for whatever reason it can cause issues with breaks rendering correctly.

You can also try &lt;cfdocument type=“pagebreak”&gt; which will break on the page. You can then put new headers and such on the remaining pages.

Putting a &lt;div style="page-break-before:always"&gt; around each table of data works forcing a pagebreak. But &lt;div style="page-break-inside: avoid;"&gt; does nothing.

I googled and see the page-break-inside property has been replaced by break-inside. But that doesn't seem to work either.

Is it because I have a table tag inside the div?

Possibly, I believe that might not be valid.

Some of the validity rules in HTML give me a cough lol.

Lemme try structuring t he stuff without tables in the div and see how it works.

No, I got rid of the table/tr/tds inside the div and the &lt;div style="break-inside: avoid;"&gt; still does nothing. The page breaks in the middle of the data.

It seems like the cfdocumentitem is the only thing that works. But I would have to count characters and predict if a record is going to hit the end of the page and if so force a page break. That seems clumsy.

Reading on StackOverflow there are plenty of discussions from 10 years ago that it's a cfdocument bug. But it still doesn't seem to have a solution. One of the hacks seems to work for me, putting a &lt;div&gt; &lt;/div&gt;&lt;BR&gt; just above the section I don't want to break. The css break-inside doesn't seem to have any effect for me.

Fwiw, I tested `page-break-inside: avoid`  with `&lt;cfhtmltopdf&gt;`, and it doesn't work there either (at least, not in CF 2016). <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/|Wkhtmltopdf>-- which I believe `&lt;cfhtmltopdf&gt;` is based on-- does supposedly support `page-break-inside: avoid`, so I'm not sure why CF doesn't. Maybe it's using an older version or something.

If you _really_ want good page-break handling with dynamic content, you might want to look into using wkhtmltopdf directly, or another 3rd party tool like <https://weasyprint.org/|WeasyPrint>, or even <https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome|Headless Chrome> (I used non-headless Firefox, started via cfexecute, together with a PDF printer, for this exact reason, and it worked great for many years; nothing beats a browser for rendering HTML/CSS).