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Page setup & CSS support

The printed document isn't produced by your browser, and that's the source of most "it looked fine in the preview" surprises. This page covers what the print engine supports.

Paper size​

Printed documents default to A4. A template can print on A3, A5, Letter or Legal instead, and the whole document is then laid out for that size.

Set it from the Page dropdown in the Code Editor toolbar. Picking a size writes the declaration into the template for you, so the preview and the finished document stay in step — there's nothing to type.

If your documents come out the wrong size for your region, that dropdown is the first thing to check. A template that asks for a size we can't print falls back to A4 and says so in the preview's warning banner, naming the unusable value.

The on-screen preview draws the sheet at the size you've chosen, with the same margins the print engine uses, so a page-size change is visible straight away.

Purchase orders are the exception

Purchase orders are produced by their own renderer, which always prints US Letter with its own repeating masthead and page-number footer. The Page dropdown has no effect on them — see Purchase Order template reference.

Why the PDF can look different from the browser​

The finished document is produced by an older print engine that understands classic styling only. It ignores:

  • flexbox and grid layouts
  • CSS variables
  • fixed positioning
  • shadows, rounded-corner cards and gradients
  • icon fonts

Multi-column layouts have to be built with tables.

This is exactly why the Interactive preview carries its Approximate — verify in PDF pill: your browser will happily render a layout that comes out broken on paper.

Build with tables and simple styling, and always confirm a layout change on the PDF tab before it reaches customers or suppliers. See the template editor reference for the two preview modes.

Long documents and page breaks​

When a document has more rows than fit on one page, the table simply continues onto the next.

  • A footer banner repeats on every page, pinned to the bottom, with a Page 1 of 3 line under it.
  • A template with no footer banner gets no page numbers either — the two come as a pair. Add a banner if you want numbered pages.
  • The table headings do not repeat.
  • There's no setting to force a break at a chosen point.

A tall row — a long description, several serial numbers, a large product image — can be cut in half across the page boundary. You can mark a block that must stay whole (a totals box, terms, a signature area) to be kept together, and the engine moves the entire block to the next page instead of splitting it.

Content that overflows​

Anything wider or taller than the printable area is clipped, not scaled down — a wide table, an oversized image, or a long unbroken code or barcode string.

Nothing warns you about clipping or a split row

Neither the validation bar nor the preview flags either one. Proof a genuinely large order on the PDF tab, and reduce column count, image size and description length until it fits.

Very long single words never wrap on their own — give them a manual break point if one appears in your data.

Next steps​

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