Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-page-3] Add orientation descriptor (#4491)

> Browsers don't have any distinction between PDF and non-PDF printed output, do they? PDF output is an implementation detail of the user agent outside of the control of the web developer.

They don't expose any distinction, no. But this feature distinguishes those two cases; your proposed `'orientation'` has *no effect* on paper output (it continues to be portrait-oriented) and only affects PDF output. My counter `margin-orientation` does the exact same, just in reverse.

> This is another motivation, yes. However, I don't agree with the notion that this is a hack. The other proposed solutions, as far as I can tell, imply a very large amount of implementation work (even more than just implementing full fragmentation, because there is the proposed additional feature of rotating headers and footers differently than the page layout). Therefore this solution is has positive design points for the (valid, non-hack) use-cases stated.

It's *absolutely* a hack, because it requires you to write your content *in the wrong orientation* for screen, to get this desired display when printing. Using 'writing-mode' to make a table lay out "sideways" so that, when printed, it'll get landscape dimensions from a `size: portrait` page, is definitely a hack. The **correct** way to do all of this is as I described: lay out your table *normally*, break it onto a `size:landscape` page for printing, and then use some theoretical feature along these lines to ensure the margins are in the desired orientation when paper-printing.

I understand that actually doing breaking across different-sized fragmentainers/pages is still far off in our impl (Ian says ~2 years), so if we want to address this use-case in the short-term we'll need something hackier like this, and I'm fine with that. I just want a different name to emphasize that fact! `orientation` is too prime of a name to use for a "we're doing X because we haven't implemented Y yet" feature.

I'm not sure what the name should be though. :(

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Received on Friday, 28 February 2020 23:17:40 UTC