Creating Print Templates with Behaviors

Internet Explorer 6 improves the printing model, in terms of better handling of lines at page boundaries, text spacing quality, and uniformity across printers. The print architecture underwent a major overhaul in Internet Explorer 5.5, by introducing the Print Preview and print template capabilities. By creating print templates, you can control:

• The layout of pages and their content when printed/previewed.
• The print job parameters such as the page printing order.
• The look of the Print Preview window and controls available on the print preview user interface.

You can do a lot with print templates. Among other things, print templates can be used for:

• Adding fixed banners to print jobs, including company logos, legal notices, and advertisements.
• Customized placement and styling for header and footer elements, such as page numbers or chapter headings.
• Application-specific printing (calendars).
• Multi-fold brochure printing.
• Book-style printing using mirrored margins for the odd and even pages.

Print templates are HTML files that use four print template behaviors:

• LayoutRect
• DeviceRect
• TemplatePrinter
• HeaderFooter

DHTML Behaviors are similar to libraries in other programming languages. A behavior is like a function that you can access via an API (Application Procedural Interface). It sports a set of properties and methods you can invoke for your particular object. DHTML behaviors were first introduced in Internet Explorer 5.0. Internet Explorer provides you with a set of default behaviors. The above four behaviors belong to this category of default behaviors. You can write behaviors of your own and put them in a ".htc"-extension file. To learn more about behaviors, go to Column 22, DHTML Behaviors and Column 23, More on DHTML Behaviors.

Next: How to use the DeviceRect behavior