Easily remove page numbers for blank pages (book class)

Question

Edit: it was suggested that there is a case of duplication. There is no case of a duplicate, because this question specifically concerns only removing page numbers on supposedly empty pages, while the suggested earlier question concerns removing every element on a supposedly empty page. Obviously, as reason dictates, these are not the same nor can they ever be. Furthermore, to then explain why the suggested possible solution did not work is irrelevant. End Edit.

Arrgh!

That was an expression of my real physical groan.

After having looked around the internet for a long time, my LaTeX manual, and after having wrestled with the markup code, using LuaLaTeX, I still haven't come to a solution for such a simple matter.

I have a book document, where there is for example a titlepage starting on the right odd-numbered page, after which there is immediately a copyright page on the left, a blank page or two or so, and then an introductory text, and then the start of a chapter after some blank pages starting on the right, and at the end of it all a bibliography.

The problem is that it seems so tedious or cumbersome to easily remove the page numbers off pages supposed to be blank.

I had managed to do it to some extent (after looking around), for example, between the copyright page and the introductory page, using things like \break and \pagenumbering{gobble} and \setcounter (EDIT: and \pagestyle{empty}) (and so on) but sometimes, for example between the introductory text and the first chapter, the text of the ending page of the introductory text gets torn apart over the whole of its ending page. (The same kind of problem I had at the end of the document, where I inserted some new pages (with a custom command I will show in this post) to have a total page amount directly divisible by two: in this case the text on the ending page of the bibliography gets torn apart.)

Sometimes the wrong page number was removed, so I had to play with the code to get the desired effects, but then that may still leave the above problem.

There has to be some person out there who, by reading this post, already has a good idea of what's going on. I have the suspicion that the solution is very simple.

Let me post a few snippets of code:

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper, titlepage]{book}
\usepackage{polyglossia} 
\setmainlanguage{english}
\usepackage{paracol,fontspec}

\usepackage{etoolbox}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{plain}

%% make new command for empty page
\newcommand*\NewPage{\newpage\null\newpage}

The fontspec and paracol packages are not used in this document, and never seemed to give me any problem with compiling.

Arrrrgh! (Another expression of my physical groan.) I've become tired of it.

What is the most straightforward, easy, proper way to remove page numbers on (in-between) pages supposed to be blank?

Possible subquestion: is there a simple overall/general command to automatically suppress such page numbers?

Answer 1

Upon starting new chapter with \chapter{...}, the book class calls \cleardoublepage in the background leaving an empty page (if needed) with plain page style active.

You should change the behavior of \cleardoublepage, put this into preamble:

\let\origdoublepage\cleardoublepage
\newcommand{\clearemptydoublepage}{\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\origdoublepage}}
\let\cleardoublepage\clearemptydoublepage

Answer 2

Don't mess with this.

LaTeX styles distill centuries (literally) of experience in designing document layouts. You might find it ugly or meaningless, but a lot of work by experts earning their living on such decisions went into making it just like it is today.

Answer 3

The comment by @ivankokan is spot-on. I have also written a package, clrdblpg, which will do this for you (or, alternatively, give blank pages whatever page style you want). Simply do the following:

\usepackage{clrdblpg}

And you're done, as the default is that pages produced by \cleardoublepage are blank. Alternatively, to make this fact explicit, you can do:

\usepackage[style=empty]{clrdblpg}

This will have the same effect. Put whatever page style you want, though it sounds like this is what you're looking for. The package is on CTAN.

Answer 4

I had a similar problem, though I only needed a single empty page, not double. I solved it this way:

% Empty Page
\pagebreak
\phantom{a}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\pagebreak

\thispagestype{empty} removes the page number from this specific page