[SalesForce] Long Text Area not rendering correctly when rendered as pdf

You can set page breaks via CSS, though you may have to change your page's structure to accomplish this. There is a good example on Developerforce that demonstrates this. It works as follows:

1. A two-dimensional array
2. Using <apex:repeat> or a similar construct
3. Having your controller populate the 2-d array

In your controller:

1. Execute the SOQL to generate your list of results
2. Populate the 2-D array as follows
   1. Each outer element represents a page worth of results
   2. Each inner array represents the rows to display

In your VF page:

1. An outer loop to generate each page
2. An inner loop to generate each row
3. CSS to provide page-break-after:always; at the end of each page

The number of elements that you can fit on a page will vary and require some experimentation to get right. Also note that working in Development Mode breaks the CSS as I found out the hard way.

Salesforce uses the Flying Saucer library to convert Visualforce pages to PDF.

Flying Saucer only supports up to CSS 2.1.

word-wrap and overflow-wrap were introduced in CSS 3, and are thus not supported.

white-space: normal appears to be the default, was introduced in CSS 2.1, and it does wrap words, but it requires whitespace.

If you don't have whitespace, there's nothing you can do with CSS to make your PDF render the way you want it to.

About the only thing I can think of here would be to choose a moderate number of letters that you can safely display in a column (without overflowing), and then process your text in a custom controller (or controller extension) to insert line breaks after every X characters.