Page break characters for more/less

I am on Mac OS. I have a C++ program that generates 1000+ lines of data that I redirect to a file. I then use less / more to go through the file. I'd like to have less pause at user-defined chunks of data instead of of pausing every screenful. I thought I could use the ^L character to mark page breaks, but even after adding them in my C++ code with

-c++
        printf("control-l \n");

the less command on my Mac will still pause at every screenful instead of at each control-L. I remember from decades ago that this worked on Unix. Do I need to do something different here?