How to make a HTML Page in A4 paper size page(s)?

Question

Is it possible to make a HTML page behave, for example, like a A4-sized page in MS Word?

Essentially, I want to be able to show the HTML page in the browser, and out

Answer 1

It's entirely possible to set your layout to assume the proportions of an a4 page. You would only have to set width and height accordingly (possibly check with window.innerHeight and window.innerWidth although I'm not sure if that is reliable).

The tricky part is with printing A4. Javascript for example only supports printing pages rudimentarily with the window.print method. As @Prutswonder suggested creating a PDF from the webpage probably is the most sophisticated way of doing this (other than supplying PDF documentation in the first place). However, this is not as trivial as one might think. Here's a link that has a description of an all open source Java class to create PDFs from HTML: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2006/jw-0410-html.html .

Obviously once you have created a PDF with A4 proportions printing it will result in a clean A4 print of your page. Whether that's worth the time investment is another question.