It directs the printer to eject the current page and to continue printing at the top of another.
The form feed character code is defined as 12 (0xC in hexadecimal), and may be represented as Ctrl+L or ^L.
Some editors, in particular emacs and vi, have built-in commands to page up/down on the form feed character.
GNU Coding Standards require such form feeds in C.[2] In Usenet, the form feed character is used by several newsreaders as a "spoiler character", causing them to automatically hide the following text until prompted, as a way to prevent spoilers from being inadvertently revealed.
This use of the form feed character is not supported by all newsreaders, and is not standardized, although it has appeared in a draft of a Usenet Best Practices document by the IETF's USEFOR working group, as a feature that user agents should (but are not required to) support.