Re: The `^L' appeared in built-in help.

[Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 10:55 AM Emanuel Berg via Users list for the
GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hongyi Zhao wrote:
>
> > I noticed so many `^L' appeared in Emacs' built-in help.
> > According to the ascii document shown below, this should
> > mean '\f' (form feed):
> >
> > $ man ascii | grep ' L$'
> >        014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)        114   76    4C    L
> >
> > But I also noticed that this control character is not used
> > evenly throughout the document.
> >
> > Any hints for this phenomenon?
>
> This was discussed here not long ago! See if you can grep the
> archives! [1]
>
> They are used to delimit
>
>
>
> pages!
>
> M-x insert-char RET FORM FEED (FF) RET
>

But `M-x describe-char RET' for `^L' in scratch buffer shows the following:

            to input: type "C-x 8 RET c" or "C-x 8 RET FORM FEED (FF)"

And the above-mentioned two type input sequences will generated
different characters:

"C-x 8 RET c" --->  `^F'
"C-x 8 RET FORM FEED (FF)" --->  `^L'

> [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/

Are there some built-in Emacs commands for searching this mail archive
conveniently?

Regards
-- 
Assoc. Prof. Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com>
Theory and Simulation of Materials
Hebei Vocational University of Technology and Engineering
NO. 552 North Gangtie Road, Xingtai, China