Comment Re:but I thought HTML was supposed to fix all that (Score 1) 347
Just because you're familiar with hammers doesn't make them the best tool for all possible jobs. Sometimes you would be better served by a saw.
The poster said he's fairly new to web applications development, so I wouldn't even say he's familiar with hammers.
Printing on the web is not really that bad, unless you need pixel perfect accuracy.
To the poster, if you need that kind of control and "CSS accuracy" then you're SOL as all browsers have their own CSS/printing quirks and you'll be in a world of hurt going down this path.
I think your best bet is to do this on the server side and serve something more appropriate like say a PDF. There are libraries out there that generate PDFs from HTML/CSS (dompdf in PHP for example).
They have their own shortcomings (e.g. dompdf doesn't respect vertical-align on table cells and even crashes when you have a table element that spans more than one page), but at least you'll know that the output will be consistent across all browsers/platforms and will be printed as such.
You could of course go gung-ho with postscript and create PDFs without the HTML/CSS translation mess. Your data and application logic are separate from presentation, aren't they?