Page break

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A page break is a marker in an electronic document, which tells the document interpreter that the contents which follows is part of a new page. A page break causes a form feed, to be sent to the printer, during spooling of the document to the printer.

[edit] Form feed

Form feed is one of control characters in ASCII. It forces the printer to eject the current page and to continue printing at the top of another. Often, it will also cause a carriage return. The form feed character code is defined as 12 in decimal and 0C in hexadecimal. In the C programming language (and other languages derived from C), the form feed character may be represented as '\f'

Form feed is seldom used when programming with modern printers in modern operating environments like Windows, Unix, or Mac OS. Instead, form feeds are generated by having the printing program call a form feed API function. For example, when printing using the .NET Framework, the PrintPageEventArgs.HasMorePages property is used to indicate a form feed is desired.

The form feed character is sometimes used in plain text files of source code as a delimiter for a page break, or as marker for sections of code. Some editors, in particular emacs, has built-in commands to page up/down on the form feed character. This convention is predominantly used in lisp code, and is also seen in Python source code.