Good question came up this week from one of the Project Managers at work. “If nobody is printing physical spec manuals, then why insert blank pages to odd numbered sections?”
In a world of PDFs, does it matter anymore? What do you all do?
We still include the blank page with the text: THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. There are many instances where we as well as contractors distribute single sections to team members, consultants or building trades for various reasons. It works much better to keep each spec section as a stand-alone piece.
Gail, thanks for the reply. Workflow question? Are you providing the contractor individual pdfs or a single pdf? If a single pdf is provided, I’m assuming the contractor just extracts the standalone pages desired and creates a new pdf. How does having/not having blank pages effect the process?
We provide the Contractor a single Book-marked PDF.
They usually use Procore and can readily separate into individual spec sections. The Procore Program does this automatically.
By using blank pages for uneven spec sections, you can readily see you have the specific spec section without any other additional non-related info. I see how you can avoid having to do this, but you never know when people still may choose to print out any given section.
I’m just saying this is an area that we still follow traditional protocol.
The simplest way to indicate that an electronic or paper copy of a section is complete without extraneous material is to type END OF SECTION XXXXXX at the end of the last piece of text. The page number on that page shows the total number of pages for the section, and one can check that all the page numbers between that and page one are present.
People still print a lot of hard copies. Some AHJs still require documents to be “wet” signed, which requires a hard copy, and even if no hard copy is required, many people on both the A/E side (like me) and the Contractor side will still print hard copies. Not having the first page of the next section print on the back of the last page of the section I’m printing isn’t a huge thing, but it is nice.
If a page says: “THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK” then you are intentionally not leaving it blank.
Shouldn’t you really say: “This page intentionally NOT left blank”?
George, you’ve expressed how I’ve felt for years about that comment. How about “This page intentionally has these words so nothing else can be here”
The tyranny of self-referential statements and recursive loops.
The following statement is true.
The previous statement is false.
cf. Kurt Gdel, Raymond Smullyan, Douglas Hofstadter.
If the Section text is terminated via “END OF SECTION” terminology or by " **** " designation, why not just issue a blank page? Obviously, this applies only where odd-even page numbering is applicable.
If seems to make all of the above discussion a mute issue. There nothing to intercept one way or the other.
“mute” or “moot”? that is the question
A “mute” question?
I’m speechless.
LOL! Exactly! If you think about it, there’s a little bit of sense in using that word - not much, and it’s incorrect, but I see it used a lot.
George, I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid when it was first published. That book was virtually too much for a certain college freshman to absorb at the time but I have referred to my copy a few times over the past 40+ years.
Ditto Gail’s and Dan’s comments.
And why type “This Page Left Intentionally Blank” (as opposed to just leaving blank): If you are working on a computer with a PDF you know if it is actually “blank” as opposed to waiting for it to fill in. Some large files take a while to fill in as you page through a document.
As VisiSpecs and SpecLink both make it easy to add these at the end of sections, I don’t see it as a problem.
The government probably came up with that phrasing – the government is great for that sort of thing.
If one prepares a separate pdf document for each section, there are ways of compiling multiple sections so that the printer identifies the first page of each section and prints the section accordingly. There should be no need for blank pages in this day and age. Stating “END OF SECTION” on the last page of a section is a good safeguard in case printed pages get mixed up, since it has a page number on it that identifies how many pages there should be for that section.
Another reason to type “This Page Left Intentionally Blank” (as opposed to just leaving blank): Contractors and estimators looking at the documents become suspicious of blank pages, thinking they are missing something, or there was some sort of printing error leaving something out.
How about “Placeholder Page” or “Pagination Page” or “Printer’s courtesy page” or “Left-handed, odd-numbered last page” or “There is no information on this page” or “See next page” or “Really, that was the End of Section”…
So in summary: I’m avoiding the pages altogether and just not including them.
Thanks for the enjoyable thread. And please carry on posting here if you all would like. No reason to stop now.
I stopped using blank pages about 15 years ago. No one ever said anything. Not once.