Empty pages in the preface section of my thesis

Question

I am writing a thesis and I'd like to use the openright option:

\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt,twoside,openright]{report}

The problem is that when I use this option, empty pages are placed between different sections of the preface. i.e. abstract - empty page - table of contents - list of figures - empty page - list of tables... etc.

I looked at the thesis.sty provided by my department and I noticed that each section of the preface are formatted to behave like chapters.

\def\prefacesection#1{
    \chapter*{#1} 
    \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{#1}}

I tried changing this code snippet so that sections of the preface are actually treated as sections

\def\prefacesection#1{
    \section*{#1} 
    \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{#1}}

Although this removed the empty pages, I was disappointed with the results. Firstly, the ToC, LoF, and LoT were not affected by this change (I assume their style is defined elsewhere). Secondly, I strongly preferred the look and style as it was before I made any changes to the preface style.

Is there anyway I can selectively apply the openright option so that the contents of the preface are unaffected? Or is there a better way to fix my problem with empty pages in the preface?

Answer 1

The toc line is styled by the code you showed: if you changed chapter to section it would be styled like a section in the table of contents

you can switch openright styles in your frontmatter using

\csname @openrightfalse\endcsname

and

\csname @openrighttrue\endcsname