ColdFusion - cfdocument, pdf and html tables

cfdocument tag of ColdFusion 8 is a great tool to generate extremely good looking PDF files/reports. Yesterday, when I was working on a PDF Generation System built on ColdFusion, I just noticed that cfdocument do not understand style="border-collapse: collapse" style. Therefore, if you are using tables in your PDF, you will see a lots of spaces and thick borders all around your tables and cells.

I highly recommend to use tableless structure inside cfdocument to avoid such problems. But if is absoulte necessary for you to use tables, then here is a fix for you :-)

• Make sure that values of attribute border, cellpadding and cellspacing is set to 0 in each table. e.g <table cellspacing="0" border="0" cellspacing="0">
  
  
• Add following style in your style sheet.
  td {
  margin-left:0;
  border-bottom:0;
  border-top:0;
  border-right:0;
  padding-left:0;
  }

Please also keep in mind that do not use <hr/> tag to generated colored horizontal line. Instead use colored image. And last but not the least, if your code inside cfdocument tag is XHTML validated, you will get perfect output.