Breaks

Thematic breaks

A line with three single quotation marks (i.e., '''), shown in Example 1, is a special macro that inserts a thematic break (aka horizontal rule). Like other block forms, the line must be offset by a preceding paragraph by at least one empty line.

Example 1. Thematic break syntax

'''

The result of Example 1 is displayed below.

Markdown-style thematic breaks

Asciidoctor recognizes Markdown thematic breaks. The motivation for this support is to ease migration of Markdown documents to AsciiDoc documents.

To avoid conflicts with AsciiDoc’s block delimiter syntax, only 3 repeating characters (- or *) are recognized. As with Markdown, spaces between the characters is optional.

Example 2. Markdown-style thematic break syntax

---

- - -

***

* * *

Page breaks

A line with three less-than characters (i.e., <<<), shown in Example 3, is a special macro that serves as a hint to the converter to insert a page break. Like other block forms, the line must be offset by a preceding paragraph by at least one empty line.

Example 3. Page break syntax

<<<

A page break is only relevant for page-oriented / printable output formats such as DocBook, PDF, and HTML in print mode.

If the page break macro falls at the top of an empty page, it will be ignored. This behavior can be overridden by setting the always option on the macro as shown in Example 4.

Example 4. Forced page break

[%always]
<<<

Some converters support additional options on the page break macro. For example, Asciidoctor PDF allows the page layout of the new page to be specified.

Example 5. With page layout

[page-layout=landscape]
<<<

If a converter supports columns, the page break can be converted into a column break by the addition of the column role.

Example 6. Column break

left column

[.column]
<<<

right column

When columns are not enabled or supported, the column break is expected to act as a page break.