I am looking to create a product ordering and invoicing system using PHP/MySQL. I am currently doing this in Microsoft Excel, purely because I can easily print out what’s on screen and I know exactly what the output will be before printing.
Can the same result be acheived with a web-based system? For example once an order is complete, I want to be able to print out the invoice with everything within the width of an A4 page.
Is it simply a case of just specifying width properties on the tables? Also will I first need to load up a printer friendly version of the page or can I just click on a “Print” button which automatically prints out the printer friendly version?
in CSS you can specify the “PRINT” version of a given class, so that when the user goes to print the page from the browser it formats differently than how it is displayed in the page.
Take a look at this: http://webdesign.about.com/cs/css/a/aa042103a.htm