Re: [emacs-humanities] Form-feed as literary-style scene breaks

[Protesilaos Stavrou]

On 2021-01-14, 18:35 +1000, "Paul W. Rankin" <pwr@bydasein.com> wrote:

> If you've poked around Elisp much you might see a bunch of form-feed 
> characters:
> ^L. When you send these to a printer they will actually trigger a page break,
> which is cool, but they still look ugly.
>
> There are a couple of minor modes that replace the ^L with a horizontal line,
> but I wanted something a tiny bit fancier, akin to a literary-style scene 
> break,
> so I put this into my init.el...
>
>     (aset standard-display-table ?\^L
>           (vconcat (make-string 15 ?\s) (make-string 35 ?─)))
>
> [...]

Very nice!

I like that effect and feel it complements olivetti-mode quite well.
For my case, ^L should stay there by default, so:

    ;; when olivetti-mode is on
    (aset standard-display-table ?\^L
          (vconcat (make-string 15 ?\s) (make-string 35 ?─)))
    
    ;; else use this
    (aset standard-display-table ?\^L 12)

As an aside, what I recently learnt about email in Emacs, Gnus in
particular, is that ^L in a message will produce a button/link with the
text "Next page...".  So you can navigate to the next page either with
the default key binding of C-x ] (which calls 'forward-page') or by
clicking on the button.  Neat trick, though I have no use for it.
Besides, I do not know how it behaves in other email clients...

-- 
Protesilaos Stavrou
protesilaos.com