Pagination is the process of dividing a document into discrete
pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. Today printed pages are usually produced by outputting an electronic file to a printing device, such as a
desktop printer or a modern
printing press. These electronic files may for example be
Microsoft Word,
PDF or
QXD files. They will usually already incorporate the instructions for pagination, among other formatting instructions. Pagination encompasses rules and algorithms for deciding where
page breaks will fall, which depend partly on cultural considerations about which content belongs on the same page: for example one may try to avoid
widows and orphans. Some systems are more sophisticated than others in this respect. Before the rise of information technology (IT), pagination was a manual process: all pagination was decided by a human. Today, most pagination is performed by machines, although humans often override particular decisions (e.g. by inserting a hard
page break).