How to add Print headers and footers in HTML, CSS and JavaScript?

Question

I have a document in HTML and CSS. I would like to have headers and footers in every printed page so that when you press Print, each page has the same footer and header. Is there a way to do this using web technologies? I can't find much information on printing besides page-break-after and so on.

Solution

This is what I found out:

You can use position: fixed and top: 0 or bottom: 0 to position an element in top/bottom of each page. However, since fixed positioning does not work on IE6, the only choice for that is to use a table with 100% height and thead and tfoot. It is some sort of magic that works the way you want it to (to have the contents of thead and tfoot to appear on each page). If you don't care about IE6 just use fixed positioning.

However, fixed positioning also means that any content you have there may go behind the fixed positioned element. So, in effect, the header and the footer does not occupy any space.

You can't control the actual header/footer (e.g. the URL that is printed). The user has to disable those himself/herself.

The best alternative to painful HTML/CSS printing is PDF. You can control how each page look like, what's the size of them and header/footer. The drawbacks are slower prints (generating PDF is not as fast as loading a HTML page) and the pain of working your way with some PDF library.

Comments

[Aleks G]

There's not support for this per se in web technologies. What you can try doing is this: (1) have <div> for header and another for footer on your pages, (2) define different stylesheets for display and print; (3) in display stylesheet, set display:none for those divs; (4) in print stylesheet, set display:block.

[Shef]

possible duplicate of HTML Print Header & Footer

[Eric]

Often, you can cover the original header and footer by placing the CSS ones over the top.

[Sankar]

Sir is there any way to print. Atleast 15 records per page is possible.Give some tips ...