When i print Invoices/estimates over two pages the format looks bad and looks cheap, needs to be same Invoice (first page) header with continuation on to 2nd and 3rd page followed by totals and terms, looks unprofessional otherwise.
The pages should be 1 of 2 or 1 of 3 displayed up in near the invoice number. Is this possible ?
Hi @pelican
Unfortunately this isn’t possible at the moment. It hasn’t come up before, so I will certainly leave your request open for others to add their vote and comment to.
If there’s enough interest, we’ll certainly take a closer look at this.
i dont hold much hope its like the CIS issue you not looking for customers in the construction industry
I came across the same issue - it would be great to sort something out to help on this issue.
Same with CIS
I’m afraid there’s not a great deal we can do at the moment to control how longer invoices/estimates break over multiple pages. Just to quote my response from an earlier thread.
The PDF converter takes a snapshot from HTML, as HTML has no concept of pages it will tend to just flow over the two pages midway. There isn’t really much that can be done to control this, you can try prefixing some carriage returns or reducing the font size, but that’s about it I’m afraid.
Our invoice designs are all based on HTML/CSS, this keeps the web view and PDF view as consistent as possible. When we create a PDF the software snapshots the long HTML and breaks the pages based on standard A4 dimensions. I can’t really see how this can be solved without allowing the user to manually insert page breaks, but I don’t feel this is a great solution either.
Just create 3 or 4 or how many pages your estimate is with a later estimate number which would correspond back to each other. that way you would get the header and footer and will look more professional.
Kube i don’t think estimates with 2,3,4 prices and numbers will look at all professional, t better to have a crap looking format then totals spread over multiple pages.
Thanks for the suggestion it needs a better way forward.
You could also create one estimate page with appendix numbers of seperate pages prepared in word. Just needs some creativity on word. 
We will shortly look to provide an option for manual page breaks to be inserted, this will enable you to control exactly where the page break happens. It will be done by adding a <PB> tag anywhere in your item descriptions, the page will then break directly under that row. It’s still a manual process but it will allow you to avoid messy page breaks.
I did make reference to this in May 2015 - Hide fixed footer on 1st page
Rob
i am not in to programming, i rather wait for either a stylish fix for quickfile or maybe another accounting package that can. - ROB’s comment goes back to may 2015 so i don’t hold out much hope , the CIS issue goes back further.
@pelican clearly we can’t implement everything that is requested on this forum. If you read my last comment on Rob’s post I suggested it would be something we’d look into should there be further interest, which as it happens there hadn’t been any in the last 2 years.
CIS is admittedly a more popular request but it did not feature in the top 10, many of which we’ve now implemented. If you’d like to discuss CIS then it’s better to do so on the relevant thread.
if the package don’t offer solution they people don’t stick around and discuss it the find one that does, Question you should be asking is how many have left because of the issue. None of this information you collect.
What PDF converter do you use? When rendering an HTML table on “paged media” a renderer is supposed to repeat the <thead> section after each page break, if your renderer followed that recommendation then this on its own would greatly improve the appearance of printed invoices, with the “Item, Description, Unit cost, …” header line repeated on each page.
We use a library called ASPPDF, they expose a method that accepts a URL and returns a local path for the newly generated PDF. We do use <thead> but the converter does not append this element to the top of any newly created pages, I believe because paged media requires CSS3 but the library we use implements CSS2.1.
We’re definitely open to trying out alternatives, we just need to stage it in so it doesn’t break existing invoice designs.
Actually much of the paged media stuff is in CSS 2.1, though there are alternative libraries out there that speak HTML5 and CSS3. A quick search found this interesting example with HiQPDF:
http://www.hiqpdf.com/demo/AutoRepeatHtmlHeaderAndFooter.aspx
It mentions adding style="display:table-header-group" to the thead element, but this is in fact valid CSS 2.1 so it might work with your existing renderer.
OK that’s interesting, we will test these properties with ASPPDF as soon as we have a spare 30 mins.
In theory a thead is implicitly display:table-header-group by default but we all know that what the spec says can often bear little resemblance to what the renderers actually do…
Unfortunately the table-header-group was ignored so we are not able to automatically handle page-breaks with any degree of sophistication.
We did however implement the <PB> tag so whenever this is found within the item description we will apply a page-break at the next row and translate across the table head section onto the new page.
This will at least allow you to have neat page-breaks and perhaps in future we will look at utilising a different PDF rendering engine that will support paged media properties.
Got the Page Break to work with invoices but not with estimates
