Print styles: How to ensure image doesn't span a page break

Question

When writing a print stylesheet, is there a way to ensure that an image is always only on a single page, instead of spanning multiple pages. The images much smaller than the page, but based on the document flow, they end up at the bottom of the page and get split. An example of the behavior I'm seeing is below:

Page 1 |                    |
       |  (text text text)  |
       |  (text text text)  |
       |  ________________  |
       | | Top of image   | |
       |____________________|
       ------page break------
        ____________________
Page 2 | | Rest of image  | |
       | |________________| |
       |         …          |

What I'd like

Page 1 |                    |
       |  (text text text)  |
       |  (text text text)  |
       |                    |
       |                    |
       |____________________|
       ------page break------
        ____________________
Page 2 |  ________________  |
       | | Full image     | |
       | |                | |
       | |________________| |
       |         …          |

All those times I complained about floats in LaTeX, and here I am asking for the same functionality... Can this be done? I'm not necessarily concerned about it working in all browsers, since this is often just a one-off document I'm writing to be turned into a PDF.

Mulligatawny

Answer 1

The only means I can think of is to use one (or potentially more) of the following css rules:

img {
    page-break-before: auto; /* 'always,' 'avoid,' 'left,' 'inherit,' or 'right' */
    page-break-after: auto; /* 'always,' 'avoid,' 'left,' 'inherit,' or 'right' */
    page-break-inside: avoid; /* or 'auto' */
}

I half-recall that these declarations only apply to block-level elements (so you'd also have to define display: block; on your image, or use some kind of wrapping container and apply the rules to that (whether it's in a paragraph, div, span, list, etc...).

Some useful discussion here: "What are most usefule media="print" specific, cross-browser compatible CSS properties?"

References:

• page-break-after.
• page-break-before.
• page-break-inside.

Shrink

Yup, this works. (page-break-inside:avoid). Now I'm reminded of why LaTeX floats are a pain. – Mulligatawny

@notJim only the floats? – Jat

The explanation is very logical, but for some reason it doesn't work for my HTML5 file with Firefox 54. Maybe just a bug, since it works with Internet Explorer 11... – Rancourt

page-break-inside - CSS | MDN is a page dedicated to this flaw ;) – Rancourt

@Rancourt Did that page change? Or am I missing something? Why doesn't this work in HTML5 with FF54? – Marx

@TheOddler Why doesn't this work in HTML5 with FF54 -- I couldn't believe this either – Rancourt

@Rancourt Very weird yea. I have since tried it on Safara and there it works fine. So I guess I'll have to whip out my mac to print pages :P – Marx

These are deprecated in favor of break-after, break-before, break-inside. – Rhebarhee

Not working for me on Safari – Dudley