TeX: Add blank page after every content page

Question

I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis and my university wants a one sided print. The printing and binding will be done by a professional print company. They only accept two sided manuscripts.

Because of that I need to add a blank page after every page of content. I don't want to do this manually using \newpage or \clearpage because there are too many pages. Is there any, maybe low level, TeX command or package to do this? Or can you suggest another tool that does this without breaking the PDF?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

One option you might look into is to use a double sided layout that allows separate formatting for the even vs. odd pages: e.g. the book class allows this. Then you will need to define the even pages to be blank (presumably you don't want headers printed, or the page count to increment).

An alternative (if you can't get this to look correct for what you need) would be to do the layout in single sided (so that page numbering, etc. is all taken care of), then have a separate latex document which includes the pages, one at a time (pdfpages may be a good package to do this properly), and then insert blank pages (with no headers/etc.) in-between. This may end up being more work, but if you have trouble with formatting, it may be the easier way to go.

Answer 2

I suspect that you'd be better off doing this by manipulating the output PDF, rather than changing the LaTeX.

For example, if you're able to print to a file on your platform, there might be options in the print dialogue to tweak this. Your PDF viewer may be able to arrange this, if only by inserting blanks every second page. Or there may be a GUI or command-line tool to do the reshuffling for you.

Having said that, I've no specific recommendations for what tool you could use. A quick look around suggests strongly that the pstops tool might be able to do something along these lines, but that only helps if you're generating your PDF from postscript.

So no recipe, I'm afraid, but this'll probably be a better direction to look.

(or, meta answer: find a different print shop, or phone again and hope you get someone who gives you a different answer!)