\pagestyle{plain} have the same effect as
\pagestyle{empty}; in simple documents, this will suppress
all page numbering (it will not work, of course, if the document uses
some other pagestyle than plain).
To suppress page numbers from a sequence of pages, you may use
\pagestyle{empty} at the start of the sequence, and restore
the original page style at the end. Unfortunately, you still have to
deal with the page numbers on pages containing a \maketitle,
\part or \chapter command, since the standard classes; deal
with those separately, as described below.
To suppress page numbers on a single page, use
\thispagestyle{empty} somewhere within the text of the
page. Note that, in the standard classes, \maketitle and
\chapter use \thispagestyle internally, so your call
must be after those commands.
Unfortunately, \thispagestyle doesn’t work for book or
report \part commands: they set the page style (as do
\chapter commands), but then they advance to the next page so
that you have no opportunity to change the style using
\thispagestyle. The present author has proposed solving the
problem with the following “grubby little patch”, on
comp.text.tex:
\makeatletter
\let\sv@endpart\@endpart
\def\@endpart{\thispagestyle{empty}\sv@endpart}
\makeatother
Fortunately, that patch has now been incorporated in a small package
nonumonpart (a difficult name\dots)
Both the KOMA-script classes and memoir have separate
page styles for the styles of various “special” pages, so, in a
KOMA class document one might say:
\renewcommand*{\titlepagestyle}{empty}
while memoir will do the job with
An alternative (in all classes) is to use the rather delightful\aliaspagestyle{title}{empty}
\pagenumbering{gobble}; this has the simple effect that any
attempt to print a page number produces nothing, so there’s no issue
about preventing any part of LaTeX from printing the number.
However, the \pagenumbering command does have the side effect that
it resets the page number (to 1), so it is unlikely to be helpful
other than at the beginning of a document.
The scrpage2 package separates out the representation of the
page number (it typesets the number using the \pagemark command) from
the construction of the page header and footer; so one can say
\renewcommand*{\pagemark}{}
which will also suppress the printing of the page number.
Neither of these “suppress the page number” techniques touches the
page style in use; in practice this means they don’t make sense unless
you are using \pagestyle{plain}
This answer last edited: 2011-04-16
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