[OS X TeX] using \cleardoublepage

[Don Green Dragon]

Hello Michael,

On 2010-2710-, at 9:35 PM, Michael Welsh wrote:

> It doesn't appear to be in TL2009 (well, my install (which may or may not have been modified) anyway) in English.
> 
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

Oh! Tobias Oetiker's paper! Thanks to the reference above, I see that it has been updated to "Or LaTeX2e in 154 minutes". The version I had was a mere "in 141 minutes"!  ;-)

Reading Oetiker, again, I see that this party did not really understand what the \cleardoublepage command was supposed to do. I was expecting too much! Oetiker does not say anything about the command creating an entirely blank page in the case of double-sided documents.

OK, some further investigation reveals:

Gratzer's package "cleardoublepage.sty" does have an effect whether or not you use the command \cleardoublepage. For example, with the line \usepackage{cleardoublepage} active and no occurrence of \cleardoublepage in the document, then with LaTeX's document class "book" in command, you get the following effect:

Each even numbered page, which would normally carry only a header line, i.e., the page lacks any text, is a totally blank page. E.G., the page following the title page is blank. Same when a chapter ends on an odd numbered page; i.e., the following page is blank.

Now go to a chapter which 'ends' on an odd numbered page and insert the 
\cleardoublepage command. On typesetting, the following even numbered page is entirely blank. If now, you comment out the line \usepackage{cleardoublepage} and typeset, then the following even numbered page (bereft of text) carries the usual header line.

Well ..... at least now I know how to use \cleardoublepage properly. :-)  Thanks everyone.


Don Green Dragon
fergdc at Shaw.ca