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I would like to add text 'This page intentionally left blank' to blank page (with header) but I would like to this text appear in pdf but not in the printed document. Is it even possible? If so, how?

rgb
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    You can add the text in a Optional Contents Group (OCG) layer with print state set to off. However, I don't think there is a package that can do this yet. You might be able to modify ocg.sty which is distributed with Asymptote. – Martin Heller May 28 '12 at 19:21
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    @MartinHeller There is now ocgx2 at https://ctan.org/pkg/ocgx2 – Stephen Feb 26 '23 at 15:22

2 Answers2

9

The pdfcomment package allows you to add PDF annotations to the document which are usually not printed, except if explicitly requested. Looking at the manual I come up with this example which adds a white page behind the title page to make sure the next content is starting at an odd page.

\documentclass[twoside]{book}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{pdfcomment}
\title{Test}\author{Tester}

% Not sure if this is right, but by default comments should not be printed anyway
%\pdfliteral{%
%    /printCommentPopups [/b false]
%}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\clearpage
\pdffreetextcomment[subject={overlay},height=2.2cm,width=4.8cm,voffset=-2.8cm,hoffset=1.5cm,opacity=1.0,justification=right,type=typewriter,font=Jokerman,fontsize=13pt,fontcolor=black]
    {This page was left intensionally blank.}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\cleardoublepage

\blindtext

\end{document}
Martin Scharrer
  • 262,582
  • One naive question - what shall be the fate of the text intermediate between \blindtext and \end{document}? Is that also not printed, or is the non-printing exclusively limited to whatever is put within the braces of the \pdffreetextcomment? – 299792458 Sep 25 '15 at 06:44
  • @TheDarkSide: The \blindtext just generates some example text and is not part of the solution but only there to have some text. In a real document there would be just your normal content. The empty page is generated by the \clearpage and \cleardoublepage commands not by \blindtext and only the text in the \pdffreetextcommentis not printed. I guess the 'blind' in\blindtext` caused the confusion on your part, right? – Martin Scharrer Sep 27 '15 at 18:38
2

This sort of thing is normally accomplished by adding a switch at the top of the preamble (See How to make a switch for print vs. display versions of a document with respect to links/URLs).

Personally I don't like "this page intentionally left blank pages". For starters once the sentence is typeset the page is not blank anymore and it really underestimates the intelligence of readers.

So, I would rather have an epigraph or epigraphs, but modify the code to suit:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{epigraph,lipsum}
\makeatletter
\newif\if@print
\@printtrue
\def\cleardoublepage{%
  \clearpage
  \if@twoside\ifodd\c@page\else
    \if@print
    \hbox{}
    \vspace*{\fill}
    \begin{center}
       \blankpagetext@cx      
    \end{center}
    \vspace{\fill}
    \fi
    \thispagestyle{empty}
    \newpage
    \if@twocolumn\hbox{}\newpage
    \fi
\fi\fi}
\def\blankpagetext@cx{\epigraph{We all agree that your theory is crazy. 
          But is it crazy enough?}{Niels Bohr}}

\begin{document}
\mainmatter
\chapter{Test}
\lipsum[1]
\chapter{Second}
\lipsum[2]
\end{document}

The switch is a simple \if@print.

Community
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yannisl
  • 117,160