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Is there a way to create a pagestyle wich forces all of the content of a document to the recto pages and show a "note taking area" on the verso pages?

enter image description here

lockstep
  • 250,273
schmendrich
  • 3,908
  • An idea: write your document as "normal", forgetting about the notes page. Compile it, and then use another "driver" document which use \includegraphics to insert the pages of the main document at recto pages, and the notes page at verso pages. If you are interested in this kind of solution, I can write a suitable "driver" document. Be warned however: you will lost all internal hyperlinks, and if you use \pageref, then your "main" document has to be tweaked to increase the page numbers by 2 (or perhaps you can number only recto pages) – JLDiaz Mar 08 '13 at 10:01
  • @JLDiaz There has to be a better way of doing it. – jub0bs Mar 08 '13 at 10:20

2 Answers2

6

You could try using flowfram.sty and a combination of flowframes and staticframes. This is just to give you an idea of what might be possible:

Two page spread, notes on verso, text on recto

The Code

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[papersize={5.5in,8.5in},margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{flowfram}
\usepackage{supertabular}
\usepackage{tikz}

\def\width{9}
\def\height{15}

\newflowframe[odd]{3.5in}{6.5in}{0in}{0.0in}[flowtext]
\newstaticframe[even]{3.5in}{7.5in}{0in}{0.0in}[notes]

\begin{staticcontents*}{notes}
\vspace*{0.4in}
\noindent\textbf{Notes:}

\begin{tikzpicture}[x=1cm, y=1cm, semitransparent]
\draw[step=1mm, line width=0.1mm, black!30!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=5mm, line width=0.2mm, black!40!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=5cm, line width=0.5mm, black!50!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\draw[step=1cm, line width=0.3mm, black!90!white] (0,0) grid (\width,\height);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{staticcontents*}

\begin{document}

\mbox{}\clearpage

\lipsum[1-25]

\end{document}

I edited this to provide something a little closer to what the OP wanted. I used graph paper for notes, as I am more likely to want that: The point is that virtually anything can go into a static box. Further, static frames are efficient: The material is typeset only once, and then reused as needed. The graph paper comes from http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/graph-paper/. Also, \mbox{}\clearpage is a better way to create the blank first page.

There are some limitations and you will have to read the documentation carefully.

sgmoye
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  • Thank you, I'll give it a try. I never worked with the flowfram package, but at least it seems to be of interest for me. – schmendrich Mar 10 '13 at 20:27
  • Works fine. There seem to be a problem with longtable: the table stops after a pagebreak (if in newflowframe). – schmendrich Mar 11 '13 at 08:03
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    Yes, longtable.sty seems to be a problem. However, I did a quick test of supertabular.sty and it seems to work without a problem. – sgmoye Mar 11 '13 at 12:38
4

There is an implementation of the idea I gave previously in a comment:

enter image description here enter image description here

The code

You need two pdf files. One contains the original document. The other contains a single page with the layout for the notes. In the above example, the "original" document I used was pgfmanual.pdf, and the layout for the notes was the file noteslayout.pdf,obtained by compiling the following tex source:

% Design of the layout for the page of notes
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{nopageno}
\usepackage[margin=2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{pgffor}
\begin{document}\parskip=1em
\noindent\textbf{Notes: }
\foreach \i in {1,...,31} {\hrulefill\par\noindent}
\end{document}

Once you have both pdfs, the following code is the "main driver" which merges the two as required:

% Driver to create a pdf which shows in each verso page
% a "notes" page (taken from \notelayout), and in 
% each recto page a different page (taken from \maindocument)
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{pgffor}

\def\notelayout{notelayout.pdf}
\def\maindocument{pgfmanual.pdf}

\begin{document}
% Compute the number of pages of \maindocument
\pdfximage{\maindocument}
\edef\maxpag{\the\pdflastximagepages}

% Main loop
\foreach \pag in {1,...,\maxpag}
{
  \includepdf[pages=\pag]{\maindocument}
  \includepdf[pages=1]{\notelayout}
} 
\end{document}

Note that I removed page numbering in the notes page, which allowed me to retain the original page numbering of the main document, and thus all indexes, references to pages, etc. are correct. However, the hyperlinks are lost (not clickable).

JLDiaz
  • 55,732
  • Pretty nice. But is there a way around hardcoding the 31 in the \foreach? One solution could be to divide the text height by \baselineskip and round it in order to compute the number of iterations needed... – jub0bs Mar 08 '13 at 18:58
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    @Jubobs Well <hack> you can put any big number </hack>, that would generate several pages, instead of a single page, but since the driver uses only the first one... :-) – JLDiaz Mar 08 '13 at 19:04
  • Ok. Upvote for you, Sir! – jub0bs Mar 08 '13 at 19:05
  • Thanks for your effort and the hints JLDiaz. I will come back to the hand work, if the flowfram solution won't work for me. – schmendrich Mar 10 '13 at 20:26