Reducing the number of pages

[Federico Galetto]

Hello!

I am trying to reduce the total number of pages in my PreTeXt notes to save some paper when printing. Is it possible to remove page breaks before the beginning of new chapters and sections?

Also, I am using the standard frontmatter which produces 4 pages:

1) one with title and subtitle

2) a blank page

3) one with title, subtitle, author information, and date

4) one with website and copyright info

My notes aren't meant for any formal publication, so it would be fine for me to put all this stuff on a single page. Is there any way to do that, or at least remove some of these pages like 1 and 2? Omitting <titlepage> removes all four pages so right now it seems like an all or nothing situation.

Thanks,

Fred

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Fred,

A tool like pdftk would let you easily remove blank pages before printing,
though your page numbers might look a bit suspicious to the careful reader.
Though since it sounds like you have a small audience, that may not matter.

One of our principles is:

PreTeXt respects the good design practices which have been developed over the
past centuries.

In other words, this is not the Wild West of LaTeX where packages are designed
explicitly to do bad things to your output. So the first few pages of a #book
will have the right things and be in the right places, and #chapter and #section
will open in the right places. Our usual guide for all this is The Chicago
Manual of Style.

We are sympathetic to the cost of extra pages, and sustainability, but not to
the point where we violate our principles.

A possible option would be to organize your notes as an #article with #section
and #subsection?

Rob

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[Federico Galetto]

Thank you for the quick response, Rob! I respect the desire to adhere to tried and true design practices.

One comment: in LaTeX, the standard book class does not create a page break before new sections, which suggests this was a design choice introduced by PreTeXt. Can a user override this one setting?

Thank you,

Fred

[Rob Beezer]

On 8/16/26 13:51, Federico Galetto wrote:
> One comment: in LaTeX, the standard book class does not create a page break
> before new sections, which suggests this was a design choice introduced by
> PreTeXt. Can a user override this one setting?

Long ago, I should have started a list of idiosyncracies of LaTeX. It is not
perfect. And sometimes the defaults (or options) directly contradict CMoS. And
if not, there is some package that will let you do bad things.

So, I strongly suspect a page break before #section is CMoS guidance, but I am
willing to be corrected. So perhaps something a bit stronger than a "design
choice".

We cannot stop you from using "extra XSL" and there are hooks in the
pretext/pretext script and the CLI. But it is not supported. And I'll go a
step further and suggest you should figure this out on your own so you know what
is going on (rather than one of us handing you something you do not understand).
And bug reports need to be confirmed without any extras - we don't debug
custom setups. You can ask Mitch K or Sean F what "unsupported" means. ;-)

Though, I have not done the experiment, but I suspect your AI assistant might
make short work of this one. I didn't say that.

Rob

[Federico Galetto]

Haha, thank you! I will try to sort everything else out first before trying anything that might make my document unsupported.

Cheers,

Fred