When you want to break a page, you can insert the command \newpage in the document. It is a LaTeX command, but the rmarkdown package is able to recognize it for both LaTeX output formats and a few non-LaTeX output formats including HTML,5 Word, and ODT. For example:

    1. ---
    2. title: Breaking pages
    3. output:
    4.   pdf_document: default
    5.   word_document: default
    6.   html_document: default
    7.   odt_document: default
    8. ---
    10. # The first section
    12. \newpage
    14. # The second section

    This feature is based on Pandoc’s Lua filters (see Section 4.20). For those who are interested in the technology, you may view this package vignette:

    1. vignette("lua-filters", package = "rmarkdown")
    5. For HTML output, page breaks only make sense when you print the HTML page, otherwise you will not see the page breaks, because an HTML page is just a single continuous page.↩︎