A page break is a marker in an electronic document that tells the document interpreter that the content 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.

Form feed is an ASCII control character. 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 (0xC in hexadecimal), and may be represented as control+L or ^L. 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, Linux 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.