handyfloss

Don’t know about the reader, but I keep discovering little nifty tricks for LaTeX, Perl or Linux administration, only to hit my head against the wall some time later, when I encounter the same problem again, but don’t remember the trick, and have to invent a solution again…

Nevermore!

Yeah, I don’t have a better place to put my tricks. Got a problem?

Let’s move on to the tricks:

Q: How do I move a text X mm down (or up)?

A: Producing space between two text blocks is easy:

text1
\vspace{Xmm}
text2

Producing some space before any text in the page is more complicated, because the following will just not work:

\vspace{Xmm}
text2

However, we can force LaTeX to do our will substituting “text1” with a blank space “\ “:

\ \vspace{Xmm}
text2

Q: How do I produce a blank page?

A: This is something that should seldom be done, because paging is automatically controled, but some day you might need it.

To achieve this, you cannot simply put a \clearpage (or \newpage, or \pagebreak), because it only works after some text in the page. Anyway, we can use the trick above, and do:

% This is page 1, with a normal use of \newpage:
blah-blah-blah\newpage

% This is page 2, blank:
\ \clearpage

% This is page 3, normal:
blah-blah-blah

If we want a completelly blank page (i.e. without even page numbering or headers), use:

\thispagestyle{empty}\ \clearpage