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How to replace a large block of text by an empty block of the same size?

A friend of mine is preparing some teaching materials. In the version for the lecturer there will be proofs, solutions etc. In the version for students, such parts should be omitted. But he wants the page numbers to match, so it would probably be best to leave blank spaces where the proofs/solutions are in the "lecturer" version. Setting text color to white is a bad idea, since the text is still there and can be copypasted or exported. Is there any better solution?

One that comes to my mind is to put the relevant portions into a box, set width/height/depth of a void box to its dimensions and put it there; the obvious drawback is that a box can't be split between pages.

Another one is converting the whole document to bitmaps; it's rather short, so this is indeed a viable option (however stupid it may seem).

I was wondering, though, whether there is a ready-made solution to such a problem, so that we won't reinvent the wheel.

Note: I know this is not going to be beautiful. Aesthetics is not the point of my question, but I'd equally welcome other (than huge blank spaces) solutions to the general problem of somehow "interlinking" two versions of a document, one of which is an abridged version of the other (and hyperlinking etc. is not an option, since this is going to be printed).

Note 2: I'd also be thankful for suggestions of some meaningful tags for this question;).

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mbork
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    I would suggest (just for the "beauty" reasons) to make all the additional white-space "move" to the bottom of the page. This means to issue a page-break and the same places as where they are in the original document, and of course use \raggedbottom. However, I don't know how to achieve this... – yo' Sep 25 '12 at 11:45
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    The box version is essentially the existing \phantom macro. For a version allowing breaking it is probably worth looking at (or simply using?) the beamer package layering mechanism if you produce the full document then flick a switch to activate some <1> markup then beamer seems OK making slides with missing text that line up when the text is added. – David Carlisle Sep 25 '12 at 11:49
  • @tohecz: good point! – mbork Sep 25 '12 at 11:50
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    Would it be enough if only every "Document element" (Section, Theorem, Example) started at the correct page? This should be doable as follows: 1) You store the page of every element in the full version. 2) In "whitened" document, you compare current page number with the stored one and issue \newpage if necessary. – yo' Sep 25 '12 at 11:54
  • @DavidCarlisle: stupid me, I forgot that there's \phantom (in fact, \vphantom would probably suffice). I was thinking about "the beamer's way", I'll have to look into it. – mbork Sep 25 '12 at 11:58
  • @tohecz: I can see two problems: (1) what about paragraphs without titles etc.? (2) It's a good idea anyway, but I'll probably won't be able to code it myself due to time constraints (at least not within a week, and the friend in question needs this rather quickly...). But it's a nice idea anyway, maybe I'll try to implement it later. – mbork Sep 25 '12 at 11:59
  • @mbork You can just make a \synchro command that you can issue whenever you want (and inside each "Document element" of course). I might look into it now. – yo' Sep 25 '12 at 12:02
  • @tohecz: that would be great! – mbork Sep 25 '12 at 13:27

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