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• • January 18, 2010 at 4:27 pm #54521
    kc00799

    Member

    I am in the book panel and I have added my chapter files. What I don't understand is this: I need my chapter to begin on an odd number page, so when the previous page end on say 39, my next chapter should begin on page 41. Do I just add a blank page for page 40, and if so, my entire book will be filled with about 8 blank pages to accommodate my chapters beginning on an odd page? What do I do with the blank pages or am I missing something?? Please help? Right now, my book panel lists:

    1-9

    11-18 ?

    19-32

    33-39

    41-47 ?

    

  • January 18, 2010 at 4:33 pm #54522
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    InDesign can add a blank page for you at the end of chapters that end on an odd numbered page. That's an option in the Book panel numbering options dialog box. Or you can add them yourself manually.

  • January 18, 2010 at 5:50 pm #54525
    kc00799

    Member

    yes, David I understand that. What do I do with an extra blank page? If my chapter starts at page 33 and end at page 39, and the next chapter starts at page 41, what do I do for page 40???? I know a blank page can be inserted, but what do I do with it??? This happens at least 6 times throughout the book. Any suggestions??

  • January 18, 2010 at 5:56 pm #54526
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    What do you do with it? I'm sorry, but I don't understand the question. You can leave it blank… you can put a “This page left intentionally blank” message on it (and point it out to your printer so that they don't print that message). You can put running heads on it (some people prefer that to a blank page. You can rework the page endings earlier in the chapter so that some text ends up on the final page after all…

  • January 18, 2010 at 7:46 pm #54527
    kc00799

    Member

    David,

    Thanks for replying. Just so we are clear, you are saying in a professional book, it's ok to have blank pages with just a header or footer?

    Kathryn

  • January 19, 2010 at 2:51 am #54529
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Aha. Opinions — with a capital “O”!

    Here's mine: A blank page is professional; a blank page with only a header or footer is not professional (typically, printed Word documents are littered with these).

    A blank page that says “Intentionally left blank” is a logical contradiction which I cannot process. It must be something American — afraid of being sued for having a blank page for no apparent reason at all.

    A left hand side blank page is extremely normal. A right hand side blank page is plain weird, and should be avoided in “a professional book”.

    A blank page is not meant to do anything. It's sole reason of being is to allow the next chapter to start on an odd page again. If you don't want blank pages at all, drop the requirement of starting chapters on odd pages. They are mutually exclusive!

  • January 19, 2010 at 10:19 am #54530
    Pariah Burke

    Member

    Kc0079:

    Sorry about editing your post. There was a problem with the display of your frown emoticon, and I needed to check the code in your post. I didn't actually alter the content of the post, but it prefixed the edited by me line anyway.

    Regards,

    Pariah Burke

  • January 19, 2010 at 4:48 pm #54535
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Jongware–great post about left-hand blanks. For me it's a normal thing, and we don't put any type on there that says “blank” or “intentionally left blank.”

  • January 20, 2010 at 12:11 am #54537
    Harbs

    Member

    I actually have a book on my shelf which had the “intentionally left blank” line left in… :-(

    It really is kind of silly…

  • January 20, 2010 at 9:45 am #54549
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yes, I never really understood the “Page left intentionally blank” thing, but some printers (at least here in the USA) insist on it as a way to ensure that they're not messing up. But yes, sometimes they really get printed, which is terrible.

    What would make MUCH more sense is if InDesign put a “Yes, this page really is blank” message in the area outside the trim marks, on pages that are printed with nothing on them.

  • January 20, 2010 at 10:22 am #54552
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I much prefer to put a 10 – 20% screen of black on the blank page.

    That way any chapter ending on a blank page won't be blank, but it will have an obvious end marker for the chapter.

  • January 20, 2010 at 5:24 pm #54561
    kc00799

    Member

    Pariah S. Burke said:

    Kc0079:

    Sorry about editing your post. There was a problem with the display of your frown emoticon, and I needed to check the code in your post. I didn't actually alter the content of the post, but it prefixed the edited by me line anyway.

    Regards,

    Pariah Burke

    ---

  • January 20, 2010 at 5:26 pm #54562
    kc00799

    Member

    kc00799 said: Thanks for explaining! It makes more sense to me now!

    Pariah S. Burke said:

    Kc0079:

    Sorry about editing your post. There was a problem with the display of your frown emoticon, and I needed to check the code in your post. I didn't actually alter the content of the post, but it prefixed the edited by me line anyway.

    Regards,

    Pariah Burke

    ---

    ---

  • January 20, 2010 at 5:35 pm #54563
    kc00799

    Member

    Thanks, I get it now!

    Jongware said:

    Aha. Opinions — with a capital “O”!

    Here's mine: A blank page is professional; a blank page with only a header or footer is not professional (typically, printed Word documents are littered with these).

    A blank page that says “Intentionally left blank” is a logical contradiction which I cannot process. It must be something American — afraid of being sued for having a blank page for no apparent reason at all.

    A left hand side blank page is extremely normal. A right hand side blank page is plain weird, and should be avoided in “a professional book”.

    A blank page is not meant to do anything. It's sole reason of being is to allow the next chapter to start on an odd page again. If you don't want blank pages at all, drop the requirement of starting chapters on odd pages. They are mutually exclusive!

    ---

  • January 21, 2010 at 9:33 am #54575
    Jennie

    Member

    Oh, the stories I can tell!!!

    I have been forced to add “This page intentionally left blank” to many publications. The worst ever was that I had to create a page with nothing but the number 14 in the page number position because “people might think that we forgot to print a page” and we can't have that.

    Chicago Manual of Style actually has information on correctly numbering pages…I love that book. (I know, its a book, therefore I love it…but this one is always within arms reach of my work station).

    Unfortunately, I sometimes lose the page number battle because of my location on the organizational food chain.

    This was a great question. I wish that the correct answer(s) was/were taught as part of basic writing, language, and literature courses.

  • January 21, 2010 at 10:22 pm #54591
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    “This page intentionally left blank” is often required for POD (print on demand) documents and on-line PDFs, especially for government documents.

    Some (laser) printers automatically don't print completely blank pages. So when a page turns up missing… was it simply a blank page, was it due to a printer glitch, or did the page get lost?

  • January 22, 2010 at 1:07 am #54592
    Harbs

    Member

    If the problem is with (faulty) machinery which automatically drops blank pages, you can solve that by putting the tiniest dot somewhere on the page, that will not likely get noticed…

  • January 22, 2010 at 9:38 am #54600
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Unfortunately, a tiny dot would not be enough to show a printer error. I've seen pages print with just the master page items but no page contents.

    Not the best thing to have when reading “How to disarm a Bomb” on site!

  • January 22, 2010 at 12:46 pm #54601
    Susan Knopf

    Member

    Jennie said:

    Oh, the stories I can tell!!!

    I have been forced to add “This page intentionally left blank” to many publications. The worst ever was that I had to create a page with nothing but the number 14 in the page number position because “people might think that we forgot to print a page” and we can't have that.

    Chicago Manual of Style actually has information on correctly numbering pages…I love that book. (I know, its a book, therefore I love it…but this one is always within arms reach of my work station).

    Unfortunately, I sometimes lose the page number battle because of my location on the organizational food chain.

    This was a great question. I wish that the correct answer(s) was/were taught as part of basic writing, language, and literature courses.

    ---

    I've had clients who didn't understand the concept that sheets of paper have two sides. They insisted on starting chapters on righthand pages, but when I sent them a printout or even a PDF (with some chapter-ending lefthand pages blank), they said, “I'm not going to pay for all those blank pages! Take them out!

  • January 23, 2010 at 3:19 pm #54623
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    SueKnopf–that was hilarious about the clients not wanting to pay for those blank pages. Priceless! :D :D :D :D

  • January 23, 2010 at 6:55 pm #54627
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    We'd get clients complaining “some chapters have a blank before them, others don't”, until we changed the PDF Open View to always show 2 pages at once, with a title page. You can change this in Acrobat, Document Properties, View Settings, then save.

    Pity InDesign can't automatically create its PDFs with that setting (I sent a Feature Request for that).

    — And we still get that complaint, only now it's not always. :-(

  • January 24, 2010 at 2:39 am #54628
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I've thought about this for a long long time and came to the conclusion that it's hard to get people to understand the dynamics of blank pages and having multiple of 4's. I've see many times where they want to remove a page from a publication of 100 pages and not understand that it needs to be 96 or 100, and when ask them to put in something else instead they don't understand.

    It's constant, because people get their head around printing, and that's why I'm there I guess.

  • January 24, 2010 at 5:09 pm #54632
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Eugene–For book publishing we deal with 16s. And no more than four blanks at the end of the book.

    Had one freelance deisgner who did a job and there were ten blanks at the end. We said you can't do that. He said, but there's six blanks due to chapters starting new right-hand pages. Just add 'em up.

    It took a while to explain what even forms was.

  • January 25, 2010 at 7:07 am #54638
    Jennie

    Member

    SueKnopf said:

    Jennie said:

    Oh, the stories I can tell!!!

    I have been forced to add “This page intentionally left blank” to many publications. The worst ever was that I had to create a page with nothing but the number 14 in the page number position because “people might think that we forgot to print a page” and we can't have that.

    Chicago Manual of Style actually has information on correctly numbering pages…I love that book. (I know, its a book, therefore I love it…but this one is always within arms reach of my work station).

    Unfortunately, I sometimes lose the page number battle because of my location on the organizational food chain.

    This was a great question. I wish that the correct answer(s) was/were taught as part of basic writing, language, and literature courses.

    ---

    I've had clients who didn't understand the concept that sheets of paper have two sides. They insisted on starting chapters on righthand pages, but when I sent them a printout or even a PDF (with some chapter-ending lefthand pages blank), they said, “I'm not going to pay for all those blank pages! Take them out!

    ---

    Let's add the ever popular printing request item…1 original. Now the original may have 75 bazillion pages but they still think that is one original!

    I'm not sure why people don't get this. Then I'm not sure I get people?????

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