Preventing minipage from creating a blank page

Question

So I've got a document that is leading off with a minipage. From what I understand, the minipage environment tries to fit the box it creates on the current page, and if it is unable to do so, it moves itself to the top of the next page. The document that I have is currently doing that, because the minipage is slightly larger than the page itself. As such, it moves itself to the next page, despite there being nothing before it on the page. Is there a way to get it to not flee away like this?

Here is a MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[a4paper, portrait, margin=0.75in]{geometry}
\pagenumbering{gobble}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{5 in}
\lipsum[10-25]
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Using this generates a two page pdf. The first is blank, the second contains the lorem ipsum text flowing longer than the page itself. If you change the amount of text used so that it fits on one page, then it magically doesn't create the blank page either.

Answer 1

Based on the fact that you want to force the content to remain on the current page, yet it is just too tall to fit, you can \smash it (removing any vertical height) and then force a jump to the following page (if needed for additional content):

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[a4paper, portrait, margin = 0.75in]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\pagenumbering{gobble}

\begin{document}

\smash{% Your over-sized minipage...
  \begin{minipage}[t]{5in}
    \lipsum[10-25]
  \end{minipage}%
}

\clearpage

abc % Page 2 content

\end{document}

Answer 2

You need to use \smash to tell LaTeX to ignore the height of the box, and then \clearpage to manually insert a page break, as per Werner's answer. However most of the time you cannot simply wrap a \smash around the minipage environment, because it will typically contain paragraph breaks and \smash does not allow these in its argument. The solution is to use the lrbox environment to save the page into a box and then \smash that. We can package this up into a new environment, which I've called smashminipage.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newsavebox\thesmashminipage
\newenvironment{smashminipage}
  {\begin{lrbox}{\thesmashminipage}\begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}}
  {\end{minipage}\end{lrbox}\smash{\usebox{\thesmashminipage}}\clearpage}

\begin{document}
\begin{smashminipage}
\lipsum[10-17]

\lipsum[18-25]
\end{smashminipage}

Page 2 content
\end{document}

For a slightly more robust version of this smashminipage environment that will work if your page with a multicols, tikzpicture or title in a much larger font, you'll need to add a \null at the start of the minipage, e.g.

\newenvironment{smashminipage}
  {\begin{lrbox}{\thesmashminipage}\begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
   \null\par\vspace{-\baselineskip}}
  {\end{minipage}\end{lrbox}\smash{\usebox{\thesmashminipage}}\clearpage}

I admit I don't really understand why this is needed, which is why I haven't added that to my initial answer.