Explicit page breaks (was: Create in Org a bilingual book with facing pages)

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Ihor Radchenko writes:

>>> 1. \clearpage command, which reminds me about
>>>    https://orgmode.org/list/87mtamjrft.fsf@localhost
>>>    May it be useful to have page break syntax element in Org?
>>
>> I really don't have an opinion at the moment... As a user I try to put
>> as few direct LaTeX commands as possible: commands like \newpage,
>> \pagebreak, \clearpage, \bigskip, \quad, etc. Whenever I can, I
>> prefer to control spaces and page breaks using more general macros. And,
>> when I put these commands, the fact of resorting to an export snippet
>> does not usually bother me, since they are not very verbose commands.
>> But I don't know what other users will think...
>
> Fine-tuning commands should indeed be dedicated to specific export
> backends. It is generally meaningless to have \clearpage in html export.
>
> However, \pagebreak specifically is something people use in plain text
> files, and it may be useful for odt exports.

I agree. In the case of odt its xml is a pain for me to deal with, and
usually I have to open an odt document in Emacs and look at the
contents.xml file to find the (probably) correct tag Between that
hideous labyrinth of tags :-)

Well, considering that the most sensible place (IMO) to introduce an
explicit page break would be before almost anything that isn't a section
(since in sections page breaks should be defined by style), how about
something like this:

#+ATTR_LATEX: :pagebreak \clearpage
#+ATTR_ODT: :pagebreak t
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit...

(In the case of LaTeX the expected value of :pagebreak could be any of
several commands that LaTeX has for page breaking (or any other
arbitrary code). And if you put :pagebreak t, the default value would be
\pagebreak.

And to introduce an explicit break before a heading, the above could be
added as a property.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel