Re: Explicit page breaks

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Ihor Radchenko writes:

> Do note that page breaks may or may not lay between paragraphs or Org
> elements. By its nature, page break is an object (in Org terminology).

Indeed, page break can be placed anywhere. But inserting it before
paragraphs, at least in Org, is the least compromised by the
idiosyncrasies of each format: odt or LaTeX. And the most
format-agnostic. And on the other hand, in LaTeX and odt it's also the
safest place to put them, unless you want to add some fine-tuning in
either case.

Why would anyone want to add an explicit page break and interrupt the
natural flow of text on the page? It occurs to me that for two possible
reasons: a) for (let's say) "expressive" reasons, that is, because you
want certain content to start on a new page. And b) out of simple
necessity, to fix something you don't like: carry a line to the next
page, fix an overfull vbox in LaTeX, or a thousand other things.

Cuts by necessity can occur within the paragraph. But cutting a page
within a paragraph is a tricky thing. In libreoffice (and I think in any
word processor) you can place the cursor where you want to cut and press
control + enter. This creates a new page but also creates two
paragraphs, and we only want one paragraph, but with a page break in the
middle. I suppose that a forced line break should be added at the end of
the previous paragraph (and probably produce a very ugly result with
very wide spaces between words). But the section on the next page would
still be a new paragraph for libreoffice.

LaTeX is more refined, but the process and the caveats are the same.
\clearpage adds a new page (and a new paragraph) and terminates the old
one. And \pagebreak simply adds a page break (and the best place to add
it is between two paragraphs, I insist). If you have \flushbottom active
(by default in the book class), with \pagebreak LaTeX will do its best
to match the page height after \pagebreak, inserting the necessary
vertical space before the break. If you want to insert a page break
(\pagebreak) within a paragraph, LaTeX will choose the end of the line
to break. If you want to force the break exactly there, you'll probably
want to put something like \linebreak\par\pagebreak; again, you will now
find yourself with two paragraphs, and you will need to add at least one
\noindent before the second paragraph.

With all this, I mean: to what extent should Org care about all these
details, more related to fine-tuning the output format?

Best regards,

Juan Manuel