general publication quiestion

[Daniel Emory]

--- Charles Beck <Charles.Beck at infor.com> wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something, and then again, maybe
> I'm not. I too have
> always considered it a strange paradox when I see
> the words "This page
> intentionally left blank." But there is no need to
> use it.
==========================================
Mis-printed technical documentation has real-world
consequences. A printer device can misfeed two or more
sheets at once, inserting completely blank
double-sided sheets, or, even worse, it may print one
side properly, but mis-feed two or more sheets at once
on the second pass to produce the backside pages,
which results in an incorrect blank backside for one
or more pages.

The fact that, more and more, technical manuals are
being delivered as computer files, not professionally
printed and bound paper documents, increases the
likelihood of printing errors when users print out all
or part of a manual, and thus unambiguous
identification of blank pages becomes even more
important. 

In designing technical documentation, technical
writers have an obligation to consider the impact of
such things as printing and binding errors,
particularly when such errors could have
life-and-death consequences. 

How, then, do you prevent such consequences. There's
only one way, and that is for users to be trained that
any completely blank page or page side constitutes an
error that must be corrected. Consequently, every
single page must have text. The logical solution for
an intentionally blank page is to place the statement
"THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" in the center
(not the edges, which may be incorrectly trimmed or
mis-printed) of the page.