Home → General LaTeX tips and tricks → Empty pages

24. How can you add empty pages to the end of a document?

Answer

This may seem like an extremely trivial question, but rather to my astonishment it actually took me a while to figure out the answer.

The reason for wanting this in the first place is that Ponsen & Looijen (who printed my thesis) needed the manuscript submitted to them with the number of pages an exact multiple of 8. As I had a 189-page manuscript I had to fill out the document with three blank pages at the end in order to meet this requirement.

The problem is first that these pages needed to be absolutely blank (i.e. no headers or footers or page numbers), and second that LaTeX should not try to be clever and add more pages than are actually needed (which, when in two-page mode, it likes to do). In the end, the solution that worked for me is described below, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there must be an easier way.

Example usage

In the document:

...

%% Ponsen & Looijen need the manuscript to be filled with blank pages
%% until the total number of pages is divisible by 8. The following
%% achieves this (not generically, but specifically for this manuscript's
%% pagecount.)

\begin{titlepage}
\fancyhf{}
\newpage
\mbox{}
\newpage
\mbox{}
\newpage
\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

Note: The \fancyhf{} commands clears the custom headers and footers installed by the fancyhdr package.

Updates

2 June 2102

An email correspondent provided what looks to be the 'easier way' I was looking for. His suggestion (untested by me) is to use the following:

\newcommand{\blankpage}{
\newpage
\thispagestyle{empty}
\mbox{}
\newpage
}