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I am preparing a thesis. In order to reduce the number of physical sheets of paper, I need to print certain figures/tables on the verso side. However the university regs state that, while figs/tables may appear on the verso, the body text must appear on the recto side.

I would like to therefore output the vast bulk of the work on the recto page, but with occasional verso pages. Ideally they would be numbered as a "subpage" of the preceeding recto page (e.g. 131, 131a, 132...) or similar.

The approach which I will tentatively adopt is to use a "twoside" flag, then have "empty" and non-numbered verso pages until a page with content is required.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have had a similar issue, but am unable to imagine other ways of posing the question.

Benedikt Bauer
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Tom
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  • Welcome to TeX.sx! Usually, we don't put a greeting or a "thank you" in our posts. While this might seem strange at first, it is not a sign of lack of politeness, but rather part of our trying to keep everything very concise. Upvoting is the preferred way here to say "thank you" to users who helped you. – Benedikt Bauer Feb 01 '13 at 15:22
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    Do you actually want to ship out the blank pages, so print double sided with every other page blank, or just ship out the odd pages (so print single sided) and separately ship out the verso sheets (so print them on a second run) either is possible – David Carlisle Feb 01 '13 at 15:26
  • @david, Ideally I'd like to print the pdf in duplex, for the blank verso pages to remain blank, and the recto pages to be numbered as if they were produced single sided. The important thing is that the captions and referencing be correct, including the tables of figures/tables. – Tom Feb 01 '13 at 15:52

1 Answers1

7

Something not totally unlike this might work.

enter image description here

\documentclass[oneside]{article}
\usepackage{caption}
\def\a{One two three four \stepcounter{enumi}\roman{enumi} five six. }
\def\b{\a\a\par\a\a\a Red green blue yellow black white. }
\def\c{\b\b\par\b\b\b\b\b\par\b\b\b\par\b\b\b\par\b}
\makeatletter
\def\@oddhead{ODD PAGE\hfill\thepage}

\long\def\grabfirst#1#2\@@{\toks@{#2}\xdef\insertlist{\the\toks@}#1}
\let\old@outputpage\@outputpage
\def\@outputpage{%
\ifx\insertlist\@empty
\shipout\vbox to\@colht {\vss}%
\else
\begingroup
\setbox\@outputbox\vbox to\@colht {%
\expandafter\grabfirst\insertlist\@@
}%
\def\@oddhead{\thepage(x)  \hfill EVEN PAGE}
\old@outputpage
\addtocounter{page}{-1}%
\endgroup
\fi
\old@outputpage}

\gdef\insertlist{}
\long\def\insertpic#1{\g@addto@macro\insertlist{{#1}}}

\makeatother
\begin{document}

\c
\insertpic{%
\rule{1cm}{2cm}
\captionof{figure}{a picture}}
\c
\begin{figure}[t]
this\\
is\\
a\\
t figure

\caption{zzz}
\end{figure}

\c
\begin{figure}[p]
this\\
is\\
a\\
p figure

\caption{zzz}
\end{figure}

\c
\insertpic{%
\rule{1cm}{1cm}
\captionof{figure}{a picture}}

\c
\end{document}
David Carlisle
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    this works really well. It does exactly what I require, although I had to fiddle a bit with the page geometry. It also taught me (quite) a bit about the gnarlier side of tex coding. Thanks – Tom Feb 05 '13 at 18:12