Re: [css3-multicol] page-break-inside and columns

Consider this scenario; I've been editing a news letter recently that 
consist of list of news articles, laid out in a couple of columns with 
assorted pictures and tables. In doing is, it's crucial that short 
articles are not split across neither columns nor pages, although some 
larger articles with pictures may be broken up across both columns and 
pages and yet other articles are broken up on columns but not pages. The 
decision on when and when not to break on pages and columns are of 
course subjective and a matter of taste, i.e. to make the pages 
balanced, easy to read and pleasing to the eye etc.

I would love to be able to do this with html/css where each article 
could be a DIV with the appropriate style. For this case, breaking pages 
*and* columns would be interrelated and at least to me it would be 
intuitive to control the text flow across two columns and multiple pages 
with the same property. Then again, one could argue that this is the 
case because of they way I would edit the text. I would add the text and 
the pictures to do the columns and then review the resulting layout 
without any breaks. I would then allow as well as prohibit breaks on 
columns and pages to get the desired result, depending on the size and 
content of the articles, etc. I could of course add breaks explicitly, 
but I believe a "break-inside" property would make it easier to edit 
such documents. Hard breaks tend to be very difficult to work with 
because adding one break may cause problems with later breaks in the 
text flow (cascading effects that are hard to predict). It's much easier 
to indicated that a break is permitted rather than required. An analogy 
would be the use of soft hyphens.

Consequently, I think column and page break are related and that they 
may very well be controlled with the same property. Maybe not because of 
what they represent on a page, but because of how they are used. I think 
this is a pretty common scenario.

Regards,
Em2 Solutions AB
Michael Jansson



Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> Also sprach Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd):
>
>  > > I think it's a common scenario that authors don't want elements to
>  > > break. No?
>  > 
>  > To break across pages : yes; to break across columns ?
>  > I am far less convinced.
>
> If you are right, we have a simple solution to the problem at hand: we
> simply say that 'page-break-inside' only affect page breaks, not
> column breaks.
>
> Any opposing voices?
>
> -h&kon
>               Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
> howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome
>
>

Received on Thursday, 2 April 2009 16:03:50 UTC