Coldfusion - Dynamic Page Break - printing

Question

I have a form which has a table which may contain 0 rows or several rows.
The problem is that if there are several rows I want close the table on the first page before the content spills over to the next page. Then create another table for the rest of the rows on the next page along with a nice header and table headings. The hard part is, because characters have different widths and I can't predict what the user will type, it's hard to calculate how many characters can fit on a row and how many rows can fit on a page. Also if the user types something in some of the row data, it wraps to a 2nd row.
The printout looks bad when the row has only a few rows because there is a lot of whitespace on the bottom so I was thinking of adding in blank rows to fill it up. But again, I won't exactly know how many rows I need to fill before it spills onto the next page.
Does anyone have a solution to this?
EDIT:
Sorry about that. To be more clear on what I'm doing, I created a form view using CF and HTML which mimics visually like a paper invoice. Invoice line items can be added in dynamically via AJAX. There's a bunch of info to be filled out on top (Company name, address, etc), then in the middle there's the invoice lines in a table with column headings, then under it there's more info to fill out including signature fields. This format cannot be changed as it is a requirement.
So the form layout is:
Top section (info including customer info and a bunch of other things)
Middle section (table of invoice line items)
Bottom section (a bunch of other info including signature fields)
Visually on the page the above format is maintained and if there's a lot of invoice line items added, the page just scrolls and the bottom section is still at the end.
An unlimited number of invoice lines can be added so if you simply just print the page, the invoice lines will overflow onto the next page and the "bottom info" including signatures will be on whatever page the last page may be, which is undesired.
I need it so that whatever number of lines that can fit on the first page without having the form overflow be displayed on the first page along with the "bottom info" including signature. The extra lines are displayed on the next pages with headings "Continuation Page" along with the table column headings of the invoice lines.
My solution is to create a "print view" which creates the form with entered info and cfloops the invoice lines query but only loop just enough to fill the first page. If the addition of another row makes the form overflow then I would stop the loop, display the rest of the form with the "bottom info" and signatures so it all fits on the first page nicely, then do a page break with the header "Coninuation Page" and display the invoice line table with column headers and the rest of the invoice line items. Of course if the continuation page is going to overflow then I would need to do a page break and repeat the "Continuation Page" process. The tricky part is how to determine how many lines can actually fit on the page because the length of data in each row varies depending on user input. Maybe only one invoice line row filled with tons of data is all that can fit on the first page without having the form overflow. Maybe it's 10 invoice line rows when little data is entered.
My main purpose is to keep the entire form on the first page. If several invoice line items are added which pushes the bottom of the form onto the next page then I want to display only enough invoice line rows to keep the form on the first page and have a Continuation Page for the rest of the invoice lines that didn't fit on subsequent pages.
Note: The print is done via a print link on the form page which pops up the print view page (without site heading, etc.) in another window. From there they can either print from the browser or click on a print link that does a javascript print. the same "print view" I created to print the invoice nicely is also used for a PDF view created using CFDocument. The number of characters per line is not the same in the generated PDF as the HTML print view so it's even harder to determine how many rows can fit.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, then a PDF generated with CFDocument would seem to be the optimal solution. Using the cfdocumentitem tag you can specify headers and footers, which insure that the content you want appears on the first page. The cfdocument.currentpagenumber variable can be used to insure that it only appears on page one, and that the header on pages 2+ display the "Continuation Page" text that you desire. There is also a way to get the PDF to auto-print using a DDX file, though that is subject to security limitations.
You mention using CFDocument to create a separate print view, but I didn't see an explanation as to why an HTML version was required as well. I apologize if I missed it.
From personal experience with a similar project last year I would tend to recommend against using CSS for this and instead just require a PDF reader. It's possible that someone with more skill than I could make it work easily, but it was nothing but a headache for us and we could never get it to work quite right.