At the beginning of the year, we announced the Paged Media initiative as a community driven open source solution to help anyone who wants to print content with web technologies. Before looking at what we’ve been up to for the last five months, in upcoming articles, let’s have a look at what’s possible the gaps we’re trying to fill.

In CSS specifications, the float property is very interesting. The property indicates that an element is to be removed from the normal flow and instead be placed into a different place – currently, on the right or left side of its container. Text and other inline elements will then surround the floated element.

Designing a book or a print-ready PDF  requires that you think by pages. This is the major difference between formatting for the web and for PDF/Print. In a browser, we are able to implement a fixed height block with overflowing/scrollable content or automatic height block based on content. But for print/PDF, we need to be able to create pages of HTML content i.e. we need to be able to fractionate the content.