A pagestyle with note taking area on the verso page

Question

Is there a way to create a pagestyle wich forces all of the content of a document to the recto pages and show a "note taking area" on the verso pages?

Answer 1

You could try using flowfram.sty and a combination of flowframes and staticframes. This is just to give you an idea of what might be possible:

The Code

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[papersize={5.5in,8.5in},margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{flowfram}
\usepackage{supertabular}
\usepackage{tikz}

\def\width{9}
\def\height{15}

\newflowframe[odd]{3.5in}{6.5in}{0in}{0.0in}[flowtext]
\newstaticframe[even]{3.5in}{7.5in}{0in}{0.0in}[notes]

\begin{staticcontents*}{notes}
\vspace*{0.4in}
\noindent\textbf{Notes:}

\begin{tikzpicture}[x=1cm, y=1cm, semitransparent]
\draw[step=1mm, line width=0.1mm, black!30!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=5mm, line width=0.2mm, black!40!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=5cm, line width=0.5mm, black!50!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=1cm, line width=0.3mm, black!90!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{staticcontents*}

\begin{document}

\mbox{}\clearpage

\lipsum[1-25]

\end{document}

I edited this to provide something a little closer to what the OP wanted. I used graph paper for notes, as I am more likely to want that: The point is that virtually anything can go into a static box. Further, static frames are efficient: The material is typeset only once, and then reused as needed. The graph paper comes from http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/graph-paper/. Also, \mbox{}\clearpage is a better way to create the blank first page.

There are some limitations and you will have to read the documentation carefully.

Answer 2

There is an implementation of the idea I gave previously in a comment:

The code

You need two pdf files. One contains the original document. The other contains a single page with the layout for the notes. In the above example, the "original" document I used was pgfmanual.pdf, and the layout for the notes was the file noteslayout.pdf,obtained by compiling the following tex source:

% Design of the layout for the page of notes
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{nopageno}
\usepackage[margin=2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{pgffor}
\begin{document}\parskip=1em
\noindent\textbf{Notes: }
\foreach \i in {1,...,31} {\hrulefill\par\noindent}
\end{document}

Once you have both pdfs, the following code is the "main driver" which merges the two as required:

% Driver to create a pdf which shows in each verso page
% a "notes" page (taken from \notelayout), and in 
% each recto page a different page (taken from \maindocument)
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{pgffor}

\def\notelayout{notelayout.pdf}
\def\maindocument{pgfmanual.pdf}

\begin{document}
% Compute the number of pages of \maindocument
\pdfximage{\maindocument}
\edef\maxpag{\the\pdflastximagepages}

% Main loop
\foreach \pag in {1,...,\maxpag}
{
  \includepdf[pages=\pag]{\maindocument}
  \includepdf[pages=1]{\notelayout}
} 
\end{document}

Note that I removed page numbering in the notes page, which allowed me to retain the original page numbering of the main document, and thus all indexes, references to pages, etc. are correct. However, the hyperlinks are lost (not clickable).