Okay – so I had spent a good bit of time working on a few pages that I rendered as both HTML and PDF and they worked like champs, made it through one round with the client even.  Came back the next season – this week – to prep them for the next go round, add the changed fields, clean up some other code, and wouldn’t you know it but the HTML rendered fine and the PDFs didn’t.  This threw me for a total loop.  I wasn’t sure what had happened.  I found this post – cfdocument post by rip – and thought that may be the solution, but it wasn’t working either.  I got the pages to be XHTML strict even!

Then a co-worker suggested we just copy all the CSS into the pages.  Wouldn’t you know it but putting the CSS in a style tag on the page itself rendered the items as they should be.  So to preserve reusability I snapped them inbetween the style tags with a cfinclude.  That’s my suggestion for anyone else having trouble with this kind of thing. And make sure you have the media type with print in there too for your style declaration!