Is there a way to do a new Page Brake

AlanRobbo 69

Hi, is there a way to do a new Page Brake in Notepad++ ?
so at that point a New Page will be Printed.
Thank You.

PeterJones

@AlanRobbo-69 said:

Hi, is there a way to do a new Page Brake in Notepad++ ?
so at that point a New Page will be Printed.
Thank You.

So, the “positive” answer: to insert the ASCII 12 Form Feed (U+000C, which is the “page break” for old-fashioned printers), you can use the Edit > Character Panel, and double click on the FF.

Depending on your Settings > Preferences > Editing 2 > Non-Printing Characters settings, you may or may not be able to enter that character by other means – with “Prevent control character (C0 code) typing into document” checkmarked, you cannot use the windows Alt+012 to enter that character, whereas if it’s not checkmarked, you can: but the Character Panel overrides that setting, and will still enter that character into the document. To be able to see that the character is there, you need to have View > Show Symbol > Show Control Characters and Unicode EOL enabled – if it’s enabled, you’ll see a FF in a reverse-text box; if it’s not enabled, you won’t see anything, but you will be able to use arrow keys to move left or right across the invisible character, and you’ll see the status bar column number change even though the typing caret appears to be in the same place.

But (and it’s a big but), the printing algorithm that Notepad++ uses sends the Scintilla replacement boxed-FF glyph to the printer, instead of sending the actual character. (Furthermore, I think that modern Windows printer drivers don’t interpret the ASCII 12 as a “new page”). You might be able to copy the text file directly to the printer from the command line (or from Notepad++'s Run > Run… dialog) using old MS-DOS style commands, like Run > Run > COPY "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" /B PRN (where PRN could be PRN or LPT1 or \\ComputerName\PrinterShareName), and that might bypass some of the printer drivers and instead send the raw ASCII to the printer, which your printer might interpret as a control to move to the next page … but if you do, then you lose the rest of Notepad++'s rendering (which means it won’t follow your Notepad++ font settings or line-numbering or headers or syntax highlighting).

So the short summary: you can insert the form feed character, but Notepad++'s print algorithm doesn’t treat that form-feed character as a page break, so to get that character to behave as you want it to, you’d probably have to print using MS-DOS-era print commands, hoping that modern Windows still allows such.