81

To ensure that a new chapter starts on a right-hand page, the book class (and the report class with the options twoside and openright) will insert blank pages between chapters if necessary. However, these pages still contain the headers and footers as defined by the class. How can I remove those?

Note: I know that I can manually add \clearpage\thispagestyle{empty} at the appropriate points of my document. However, this seems awkward and is prone to fail if I change my document later. I'm looking for automatic solutions.

1
  • It is not enough to put \pagestyle{empty} where you do not want the headers, and then \pagestyle{your-page-style} to bring them back?
    – gdm
    Mar 22, 2014 at 9:37

6 Answers 6

95

Use the emptypage package.

8
  • 14
    I was about to ask for more information, but I realized there really isn't any necessary: Adding \usepackage{emptypage} removes headers and footers on empty pages. I was pleasantly surprised :)
    – Achal Dave
    Apr 27, 2016 at 15:33
  • 3
    @AchalDave Pleasantly surprised is an understatement! 😱 Jan 15, 2017 at 13:03
  • Note that this also removes the page numbers.
    – Jon
    Feb 9, 2017 at 10:33
  • @Jon but page numbers still increment. Any idea how to skip avoid this? Or is it bad practice? Apr 8, 2020 at 11:53
  • 1
    @JesseKnight It is a bad practice
    – CarLaTeX
    Apr 12, 2020 at 20:44
19

You could redefine \cleardoublepage:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{\cleardoublepage}{\clearpage\if@twoside \ifodd\c@page\else
\hbox{}%
\thispagestyle{empty}%
\newpage%
\if@twocolumn\hbox{}\newpage\fi\fi\fi}
\makeatother

The fancyhdr package deals with this topic in its documentation. Have a look at section 20 Those blank pages on page 26.

1
  • This is not on page 26 (section 20). May 13, 2021 at 8:58
8

I believe this is the default behaviour for the memoir class.

It can be further (bizarrely) tailored by, for example

\cleartooddpage[\thispagestyle{companion}]

or

\cleartoevenpage[\thispagestyle{Ruled}]

but, sadly, not for \cleartorecto or cleartoverso


Slightly more diligent research show this: \cleartorecto and cleartoverso include this call:

 \thispagestyle{cleared}

The cleared memoir page style is defined by:

\aliaspagestyle{cleared}{empty}

and all is nicely described in section 7.2, "Page Styles" of the memoir manual (memman.pdf)

5

The KOMA-Script classes allow to set the pagestyle of inserted "blank" pages with the option cleardoublepage (which defaults to empty). See section 3.13 of the KOMA-Script manual for details.

1
  • One can also tweak the styles directly by \ofoot etc. See scrguien.pdf
    – koppor
    Apr 11, 2013 at 7:10
2

the default behaviour for the ams document classes is to omit running heads from otherwise empty pages between chapters.

0

KOMA Script

The KOMA-Script documentation lists in chapter 3.13 the following commands to move following content to the next right-hand page:

\clearpage
\cleardoublepage
\cleardoublepageusingstyle{pagestyle}
\cleardoubleemptypage
\cleardoubleplainpage
\cleardoublestandardpage
\cleardoubleoddpage
\cleardoubleoddpageusingstyle{pagestyle}
\cleardoubleoddemptypage
\cleardoubleoddplainpage
\cleardoubleoddstandardpage
\cleardoubleevenpage
\cleardoubleevenpageusingstyle{pagestyle}
\cleardoubleevenemptypage
\cleardoubleevenplainpage
\cleardoubleevenstandardpage

Available pagestyles can be found in chapter 3.12 of the documentation:

empty % don't show nothing
plain % just show page numbers
headings
myheadings

Usage

So if you want your content to start on the next right-hand page without any headers or footers on the left-hand page before, you could use \cleardoubleemptypage like so:

\chapter{My Old Chapter}
   Content goes here...

\cleardoubleemptypage % insert blank left-hand page
\chapter{My New Chapter}
   Content goes here ...

Source

The official documentation can be found here on ctan.org.

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