Split Text Documents Into Pages (in Vim?)

Question

I am wondering if there exists a way to split text documents into pages in a format similar to RFC documents. Here is an example of an RFC document that splits pages at what appears to be 56 lines.

I've already been able to get lines to break at word boundaries at a certain line width using set formatoptions+=w and set textwidth=72.

That being said, if there does not exist a Vim solution, are there any programs or command line utilities that could offer similar functionality?

Answer 1

There's a tool called pr that's used for formatting files before they're printed, with some fiddling with configuration you may be able to get the desired result.

Edit: After a bit of fiddling I came up with this command which split a readme of mine up into four pages of 20 lines. You could probably then do a find and replace to get the desired header format.

pr -F -l 20 README.md

Answer 2

This can be done with a custom command. Here's a sketch:

command! -count=56 Paginate
\   let page = 1 |
\   <count> |
\   while line('.') < line('$') |
\       call append('.', ['-------', 'page ' . page, '=======']) |
\       let page += 1 |
\       .+<count>+3 |
\   endwhile