Having spent ten yours out of the loop, I had somehow expected browser makers to take some time out of their favorite hobby—moving knobs and settings around—to implement CSS printing support. I’m all for saving paper and all, but requiring me to pipe my HTML through LaTeX to produce halfway decent documents doesn’t feel very 2017ish to me. In 2007, it already didn’t even feel very 2007is to me.

I’m trying to make the articles on www.sapiensthabitat.com nicely printable. The good news is that I can finally style my headings so that they do not end up all alone on the bottom of a page. page-break-after: avoid is finally supported, except that it isn’t in Firefox. Well, I’m still happy. Back in 2007, only Opera supported this.

Next stop: I wanted to replace the standard header and footer slapped on the page with something nicer. It turned out that, yes, @page {} is supported now, which makes this rather easy:

@page {
 : 0;
}

Except, then I wanted to add the page number, preferrable in the form n/N to the footer, which turned out to be impossible.

Then, I thought: since my publication pipeline starts with Markdown, I might as well convert that to PDF through LaTeX and then hint to the browser to use the PDF version for printing:

<link rel="alternate" media="print" type="application/pdf" href="print.pdf" />

Never mind. Why did I even for one second think that this would be supported?