Enhancement to the CSS standard for printing?

I apologize is this is not the right place for this.  If it isn't, then
my only question is where should I go to make these kinds of requests?

If it is the right place, then, here's the problem that I am trying to solve:

I have an application which generates tickets for Boca, Datamax and
Practical Automation ticket printers.  The ticket stock is continuous
feed heavy paper.   We were printing using Java applets which allowed us
a direct connection to the printer using the native printer language,
FGL, and we could cut by ticket or by order (a group of tickets) or by
the entire print job.

We are getting away from Java applets (for reasons that should be obvious
to most people who have used them) and so I am rendering tickets in HTML
in an iframe and printing the iframe, one ticket per page and letting
the printer driver render the HTML onto the tickets.  In doing so, I've
lost the ability to cut the tickets at arbitrary points.  I can cut by
page (one ticket) or by print job (all tickets) with the printer driver
controls in the OS.  I cannot print multiple orders in one print job while
only cutting between orders.  This is a problem for my customers who often
print tickets in batches with many orders in one print job and then put
those tickets in the mail.  Printing one order at a time is a very real
hardship for many of them.  Having to figure out which tickets to go
with which order, either when cutting after every ticket or only after
the full print job is also much harder than having them cut by order.

CSS currently supports page-break-(before|after|inside), which are useful
for me to move to the next page for each new ticket.  Each ticket is
enclosed in a div element which has page-break-after in its style.

It would be nice if there was a directive like cut-paper-after or
something along those lines that which would allow me to cut the
paper after a given page.  I'm thinking that there are probably other
continuous feed paper applications where this capability would be useful.
Obviously this will require support from browsers and printer drivers
and so could take quite a while but it would be nice to eventually
have this capability.

Received on Monday, 28 April 2014 09:08:51 UTC