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@Section
@Title { Dealing with formfeed characters in programs }
@Tag { formfeed }
@Begin
@PP
The formfeed (Control-L) character is traditionally taken to be a
programs. @RawIndex { programs }
programs.formfeeds @SubIndex { formfeed characters in }
formfeeds.programs @Index { formfeed characters in programs }
request to start a new page. This is explicitly recognized by the
formal definition of the C language and many others, which treat
this character as white space from a language point of view, with
the understanding that it will cause a page break when printed.
@PP
There are no @Code { prg2lout } options for dealing with formfeed
characters. They will be converted into @Code "@NP" (new page)
symbols, causing a new page or column to be begun in the printing.
@PP
Whether formfeed characters end their line or not is a problem. Consider
this example, where @Code "^L" stands for one formfeed character:
@ID @Code @Verbatim {
abc
def^Lghi
jhk
}
How many lines does this example contain? Your text editor would
probably say `three', but when you print it you will see four. It
is not desirable to have printed programs (especially those with
line numbers attached) disagreeing with text editors about line
numbers. The solution adopted by @Code { prg2lout } to this
problem is to treat the formfeed character as including a newline,
but to assign the same line number to both parts of the original line
(the parts before and after the formfeed). If the part after the
formfeed is empty (that is, if the formfeed character is immediately
followed by a newline or another formfeed), and if the formfeed is not
inside any lexical unit, then the empty line after the formfeed will
not be printed at all.
@PP
The most common case is that of a formfeed character, outside any
lexical unit, on a line by itself. Let's see what this rule
produces in the following example of this case:
@ID @Code @Verbatim {
abc
def
^L
ghi
}
There will be one blank line numbered 3 at the end of the first page,
and a line numbered 4 and containing @Code ghi at the start of the
next page. The blank line is a necessity, at least when lines are
being numbered, because we want the last line in the example to be
numbered 4 to agree with text editors, but we don't want the line
numbers on our print to skip from 2 on the first page to 4 on the
second, because that would make readers anxious about the apparently
missing line 3. If you don't want that empty line, move the formfeed
character to the end of the preceding line.
@End @Section
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