How to add \newpage in Rmarkdown in a smart way?

In the initialization chunk I define a function

pagebreak <- function() {
  if(knitr::is_latex_output())
    return("\\newpage")
  else
    return('<div style="page-break-before: always;" />')
}

In the markdown part where I want to insert a page break, I type

`r pagebreak()`

You can make the pagebreak conditional on knitting to PDF. This worked for me.

```{r, results='asis', eval=(opts_knit$get('rmarkdown.pandoc.to') == 'latex')}
cat('\\pagebreak')
```

Simply \newpage or \pagebreak will work, e.g.

hello world
\newpage
```{r, echo=FALSE}
1+1
```
\pagebreak
```{r, echo=FALSE}
plot(1:10)
```

This solution assumes you are knitting PDF. For HTML, you can achieve a similar effect by adding a tag <P style="page-break-before: always">. Note that you likely won't see a page break in your browser (HTMLs don't have pages per se), but the printing layout will have it.