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Subject:Re: This page intentionally left blank standard From:Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> To:Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> Date:Fri, 8 Feb 2019 12:17:46 -0800
During my years in the defense industry, this was SOP, but I never saw
it required in any specs or standards. It was just something that
everybody did out of habit.
"This page intentionally left blank," aka, the vacat ("completely
empty") page, dates back to the earliest days of printing, when
people just didn't trust that new-fangled "printing" in which each and
every page wasn't carefully and individually written by hand and
needed to be assured that the printer hadn't screwed up the
pagination. However, the vacat page was preceded by "nihil hic deest,"
or "nothing is lacking," a written notation from the days when books
were created by armies of scribes who each transcribed a portion of a
book and who often ran out of content before they ran out of space on
the last page sheet of paper (or whatever) they were writing on.
Examples of "nihil hic deest" can be found dating back to the Roman
Empire.
In both cases, the intended message is, "no, I didn't screw up, it's
supposed to look like this." Yes, CYA goes that far back.
Gene Kim-Eng
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 7:08 AM Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 08 Feb 2019 09:57:14 -0500, Wright, Lynne
> <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- kronos -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > Another alternative is to use a "Blank Page" watermark
>
> Yabbuttt...
> The original question seems to be about a >>standard<<, rather than about
> alternatives.
>
> From the pervasive use of "left blank" in military documents, one might
> assume there is a Mil Spec that requires it. Why can I not find reference
> to such a Spec in a cursory search? Perhaps it's because most of my search
> hits are documents containing instances of that pervasive page. Or perhaps
> my Google foo is bar.
>
> Did we ever find a true answer?
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