Re: The `^L' appeared in built-in help.

[2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE]

On 2021-07-06 at 10:34:36 +0800,
Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com> wrote:

> I noticed so many `^L' appeared in Emacs' built-in help. According to
> the ascii document shown below, this should mean '\f' (form feed):
> 
> $ man ascii | grep ' L$'
>        014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)        114   76    4C    L
> 
> But I also noticed that this control character is not used evenly
> throughout the document.
> 
> Any hints for this phenomenon?

When printed (yes, printed, on dead trees), those are page breaks (i.e.,
a command to continue printing on a new page).  Also, Emacs has "page"
commands (e.g., count-lines-page, forward-page) that work on "page"s of
text between page breaks.

This seems to hage come up recently as well; perhaps this list's archive
has more information.