It makes me laugh, but I understand it. I’m referring to finding pages in the middle of publications that read “This page left blank intentionally”. No one ever questions a blank page in a finished piece. It’s part of our layout and publishing process. Pick up any book. Once you move beyond the cover, there is preface material, including 
publishing information, a table of contents, forward, etc. Somewhere in the mix will likely be a blank page or two – or more. Perfectly understandable and acceptable. In my days of desktop publishing, I had to ensure that my documents had the right number of pages (divisible by 4) to allow page 1 to be a right page, etc. If the document somehow came up short, I’d simply insert blank pages to correct the math.
Now that documents are routinely published to PDF, folks are able to reuse documents easily, swapping pages in and out, adding, deleting pages, chapters and sections. Ah – but this possibly opens up a publisher’s nightmare… odd number of pages that need to be assembled into a booklet and then printed. Blank pages needs to be added now!
No need to open up your layout/design software to create (of all things) a blank document, only to convert this nothingness to a PDF in order to drop it into your short-changed document. A little know & handy feature in Acrobat 9 Professional is its ability to create a new BLANK PDF file on its own. The command exists in one place, even though it probably should be in two! Clicking on the Create task button does NOT offer this feature, but selecting FILE>Create PDF>From Blank Page will open up a fresh, new empty PDF page (at your predetermined dimensions set in Distiller’s preferences). This document will also have a blank text box open with a flashing insertion point. Add text if you’d like, or leave the page blank. Acrobat even shows you a text formatting bar (technically called the New Document Toolbar), allowing you to apply basic formatting. Save this new page & reuse it in any document that needs a blank page to even out the page count.
I offer training classes in Adobe Acrobat 9, either in your facility or online. To learn more about my Acrobat classes, send me an email or sign up for my online classes.
