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Some people mentioned that the author uses the page to tell the reader
the page is blank on purpose. What may actually be happening is that
the printer/copier is telling both the author and reader.
Back when I worked in a publications dept that also handled large
production jobs, you wouldn't believe the gripes we got from both
engineers (the report authors) and the clients about blank
pages--"...those idiot copy rats (although we were so much more) can't
even get a simple 2,000 page job done right..." Of course, just enough
"mistakes were made" to justify every nasty speculation. And let me
tell you, we did a damned good job, and under killer deadlines. But the
climate was such that any single copying mistake rendered an entire copy
job suspect.
At that time, using Wordperfect 5.1, we didn't put blank pages in the
electronic document, we put them in manually before copying, so there
was no footer or page number. Later, when we switched to Word and our
blank pages had footers and page numbers, we still got questioned on
these "blank" pages--as if it were possible to copy pages in such a way
that only the headers and footers but not the text is visible!
Some of our contracts were government, so that's probably where we got
the phrase. Not the most elegant statement, but it served our purpose
well. It seems kind of specious to complain that the statement
including the word "blank" makes the page not blank. Readers know what
it means.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sella Rush
sellar -at- apptechsys -dot- com
Applied Technical Systems, Inc. (ATS)
Bremerton, Washington USA
Developers of the CCM Database
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