For printers that support formfeeds, it is often most convenient to use the ASCII formfeed character to support pagination. You can use the .formfeeds and .noformfeeds statements to override the default setting for formfeeds, which is determined by the operating system.

The default for formfeeds is:

Windows and UNIX: .formfeeds

VMS: .noformfeeds

You specify the .formfeeds or .noformfeeds statement at the start of your report specification statements, before any .header or .footer statements.

Specify .formfeeds to override a .noformfeeds default. This forces Report-Writer to send formfeed characters at the start of the report and at the end of each page in the report. You can suppress the initial formfeed by specifying the .nofirstff statement in your report specification or by including the ‑nofirstff flag when using the report command.

If the report contains page footer formatting statements, Report-Writer sends the formfeed character after the page footer. Otherwise, Report-Writer sends the formfeed character after the last line of the page, as determined from the default or specified page size. For details on specifying page size, see the .Pagelength statement. When writing to a screen, Report-Writer ignores the .formfeeds statement.

Specify .noformfeeds to override a .formfeeds default and suppress formfeeds.

You can override these statements and the formfeed defaults at runtime by specifying the ‑b|+b flag on the report command line.