Hi:
I didn't focus much on your PROC REPORT code because it looked like you didn't post the whole macro program that you were using. And you initially asked about the BREAK and SKIP not working as you expected. Using the PAGE option on the BREAK statement does work as advertised.
I believe your issue is not with the PAGE option. The LISTING destination works one way as far as dealing with output that's too wide to fit in the LINESIZE. The RTF, PDF and HTML destinations work another way as far as dealing with output that's wide.
For one thing, ODS HTML output can be as wide as it needs to be -- since the browser can scroll (almost) infinitely to the right and the left. ODS RTF and ODS PDF output, on the other hand, are bound by physical page dimensions and paper sizes and margins and font sizes. So a report with a LOT of columns will display one way in LISTING (dependent on the LINESIZE, margin, and orientation options) and RTF and PDF will display another way (depending on the ODS style being used, the font sizes, the paper sizes, the system margin settings, the orientation settings, etc). ODS HTML will display an entirely different way.
The way that RTF and PDF will "break" wide tables is not the same as the way that the LISTING destination will "break" wide tables. RTF and PDF decide how many columns can fit in the width of the page, given the factors that I listed above and then will print ALL the rows for those columns before displaying ALL the rows for the rest of the columns. This is different behavior than what you would have observed in the LISTING destination.
One of the first postings I made to the forum was on how to deal with very wide tables for the RTF and PDF destinations by manipulating the font size, cellpadding, margins and orientation options.
http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=414ƞ
You will not be able to get one page of columns 1-8 and the next page showing columns 9-16 from PROC REPORT by default. What you describe is the type of paging behavior that you would only see in the LISTING destination -- not RTF, PDF or HTML behavior. You may have to rethink your approach for this report.
Since you were using ODS ESCAPECHAR control characters, I assumed that you were no longer interested in LISTING output -- therefore, you might want to remove the SPACING, FLOW, WIDTH, HEADLINE and other LISTING only options from your code, as they are going to be ignored anyway.
Of course, one thing you could always do is continue to produce LISTING output, and capture the LISTING output in an ASCII text file. You could then open the ASCII text file directly with Microsoft Word and manually manipulate the output in Word to have the margins, orientation, etc that you desire. Or, you might find it easier to work to make the wide output fit into an ODS RTF output file so that all 16 columns fit on one page -- possibly by using the techniques shown in my "very wide table" forum posting.
cynthia