Force or refuse a page break

LaTeX decides where pages end. Most of the time it decides well, but sometimes you need to overrule it: a section heading strands itself at the bottom of a page, a table lands one line too late, or you want each chapter of a report to start fresh. LaTeX gives you a small set of commands for this, ranging from a hard order to a polite suggestion.

\newpage % end page
\clearpage % end page + flush floats
\cleardoublepage
\pagebreak[3] % soft request
\nopagebreak

The hard breaks

\newpage ends the current page immediately and starts a new one. It is the bluntest tool and the one you will use most while drafting.

\clearpage does the same thing but first flushes all pending floats. Figures and tables in LaTeX are floats: they drift to wherever the algorithm finds room, sometimes pages after the point where you wrote them. \clearpage forces every float that has been queued so far onto the page before moving on, so it is the right command at the end of a chapter or before a section where you want no stragglers. If figures seem to pile up at the end of your document, a well-placed \clearpage is usually the cure; see why figures move for the full story.

\cleardoublepage goes one step further in two-sided documents: after flushing floats it ensures the next page is a right-hand (odd) page, inserting a blank left-hand page if needed. Book chapters traditionally open on the right, and the book class calls this for you at every \chapter.

The soft requests

\pagebreak[n] does not command, it asks. The optional number from 0 to 4 states how strongly: \pagebreak[1] means “a break here would be nice”, \pagebreak[4] means “break here, period”. The middle values let LaTeX weigh your wish against its own spacing judgment, which usually produces better-looking pages than a hard \newpage, because \pagebreak stretches the content to fill the page rather than leaving a gap.

\nopagebreak is the opposite request: it discourages a break at that point. It is useful right after a heading or before a short list you want kept with its introduction. Like \pagebreak it accepts an optional strength from 0 to 4.

When to reach for these at all

The common mistake is sprinkling \newpage through a draft to fix layout, then watching every fix become wrong as the text grows. Page breaks depend on everything before them, so a manual break that looks perfect today can leave a half-empty page after your next revision. The sane workflow is to write the whole document first and only add breaks during the final pass, preferring the soft \pagebreak[3] over hard commands wherever the exact position is negotiable.