Information

On printers form feed load the next page. In many programming languages it is treated as whitespace, this way may be used to split logical divisions in code. In some terminal emulators it clears up the screen. Even nowadays it still can be find in some common simple text files in the role of page break character, such as the RFCs published by IETF.

Let's move on to the page break. A page break is a marker that electronic document has. It shows the one who deals with the document that the following content is part of a new page. A page break causes a form feed, which in its turn has to be sent to the printer during buffering of the document to the printer. Thus it is one of the elements that produces a certain effect on paginating.

Form Feed

Form feed is an ASCII control character, which breaks the page. It makes the printer to throw out the current page and then to keep on printing at the top of another any. It will also cause a carriage return in many cases. The definition of form feed character code is 12 (0xC in hexadecimal). It also may be represented as control+L or ^L. In an associated use, control+L can be used to clear up the screen in Unix shells such as bash. In the C programming language (as well as other languages derived from C), the form feed character is represented as ''. Unicode also has the character U+21A1 ↡ DOWNWARDS TWO HEADED ARROW for a form feed as a printable symbol (not as the form feed itself). The whitespace is considered by the form feed character by the C character classification function is space ( ).

Form feed is practically never used in programming work with printers of our times in modern operating environments, for example Windows, Unix, Linux or macOS. The process of creating form feeds here is different. Form feeds are generated with the help of printing program call a form feed API function. Let's see an example. In case when printing using the .NET Framework, the PrintPageEventArgs.HasMorePages property is used to indicate a form feed is required.

Not that often, but still form feed character is used in simple text files of source code, playing the role of a delimiter for a page break. It can also be a marker for sections of code. There are some editors, for example emacs and vi, who have implemented commands to page up/down on the form feed character. This convention is mainly used in Lisp code, also can be found in C and Python source code.

In Usenet, the form feed character is sometimes called as a "spoiler character". Here is the reason why. The form feed in Usernet is used by several newsreaders. It makes them to automatically conceal the following text until requested, as a way to prevent spoilers from being accidentally revealed. The accurate behavior depends on the client displaying the article. In order to make it clear, let's see an example. Imagine the following situation: Gnus displays "Next page..." in boldface, then switches to a second screen in order to display text after the form feed; slrn shows all non-space characters following the form feed as asterisks; Dialog turns the font and makes the background color change to red between form feeds; XR just inserts blank lines in order to fill up the remaining part of the article display area. This way the user must scroll down to see the spoiler. Not all newsreaders support this use of the form feed character. What's more, it is not standardized as well, although it has appeared in a draft of a Usenet Best Practices document by the IETF's USEFOR working group, as an option that user agents should (but are not obliged to) support.

Hash

MD5 Form Feed

SHA256 Form Feed

Base64 Form Feed

• ← Previous char 'VT', code: 11
• Next char 'CR', code: 13 →

Back to ASCII table