As long as you can be pretty sure that the frontmatter pages (titlepage, toc, lof, lot, abstract) only take up one page, you need do very little to make them show up on the recto (odd-numbered, right-hand) pages of the document: in all instances when you'd issue a \clearpage
command -- or where LaTeX would do this implicitly, e.g., when it encounters a command such as \listoftables
-- you need to issue an explicit \cleardoublepage
command.
The following MWE illustrates how this works. You didn't mention which document class you're using, so I'm assuming it's report
. (The MWE will work with the article
class as well, but you'll have to replace \chapter
with \section
.) By the way, if you state the option twoside
in the \documentclass
command, it'll be passed on automatically to all packages, including geometry
, that are loaded later on. Remember to run LaTeX on it twice in order to generate the table of contents, etc.
\documentclass[twoside]{report}
\usepackage[width=16cm,height=24cm,left=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum,tocbibind}
\begin{document}
%% Use roman page numbering in frontmatter
\pagenumbering{roman}
\author{Me}
\title{Some thoughts}
\date{\today}
\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}
\cleardoublepage
\tableofcontents
\cleardoublepage
\listoffigures
\cleardoublepage
\listoftables
\cleardoublepage
\begin{abstract}
\lipsum[1]
\end{abstract}
\cleardoublepage
%% In main body of paper, use arabic page numbers
\pagenumbering{arabic}
\chapter{Where Are We Going?}
\lipsum[2]
\begin{figure}[h]
\caption{Random Stuff}
\centering
xyz
\end{figure}
\begin{table}[h]
\caption{Utterly Random}
\centering
abc
\end{table}
\end{document}