As a solution to 40788 the scaling of spreadsheets for printing has been slightly modified to make it more robust against faulty user settings and simultaneously a flag has been created to allow manual breaks. Under tools > options > calc > print the flag "always apply manual breaks" can now be set as the default behavior of Calc. However, this flag is unset by default.

In fact up to release 3.2 (including corresponding OpenOffice/StarOffice releases) applying manual breaks in Calc sheets was the standard behavior. This was withdrawn in 3.3 and following releases because of a misconception of a couple of printing error reports which were caused by faulty user settings not properly handled by Calc. In the following the withdraw feature of manual breaks in Calc sheets raised a couple of bug reports which were summarized in 40788.

Now as a solution to all this mess we ende up with a pretty robust new scaling of spreadsheets to a certain width and height of pages which even works when users are requesting lesser number of pages than number of manually inserted breaks. But this behavior is disabled by default!!!

Why not making "Apply manual breaks" the default for Calc sheets again as it was the original behavior??? 
Just turn the meaning of the flag in tools > options > calc > print to "disable manual breaks, when sheet scaling is automatic". This is much more logical than allowing to insert manual breaks in spreadsheets and than requiring the users to find deep down in the options settings where to finally enable these manual breaks which are first inserted so easily.

(Bug 40788 was last managed by tibby. May be tibby should have a look at this too.)

Karl