Cfrgtkky

For the drafts of my document, I am trying to add a date and time to each page and I decided to use the headers/footers for this. I want the timestamp to be on pages that normally have pagestyle{empty}, so I added the headers like so:

documentclass{memoir}



setbinding{0in}

setlrmarginsandblock{1in}{1in}{*}

setulmarginsandblock{1in}{1in}{*}

checkandfixthelayout



usepackage[en-US]{datetime2}

usepackage{xcolor}

usepackage{lipsum}



newcommand{draftdate}{color{gray}sffamilysmallDTMsetstyle{default}DTMNow}



makeevenhead{empty}{draftdate}{}{}

makeoddhead{empty}{}{}{draftdate}



makeevenhead{plain}{draftdate}{}{}

makeoddhead{plain}{}{}{draftdate}



begin{document}

pagestyle{empty}



noindent Title Page Stuff



clearpage



noindent Copyright Page Stuff



clearpage



pagestyle{plain}

lipsum

end{document}

This results in this clearly wrong header on the first page:

The "Copyright Page" also using the empty style is correct, as is the following page using the plain style.

Replacing empty with a new page style foo fixes the problem:

documentclass{memoir}



setbinding{0in}

setlrmarginsandblock{1in}{1in}{*}

setulmarginsandblock{1in}{1in}{*}

checkandfixthelayout



usepackage[en-US]{datetime2}

usepackage{xcolor}

usepackage{lipsum}



newcommand{draftdate}{color{gray}sffamilysmallDTMsetstyle{default}DTMNow}



makepagestyle{foo}

makeevenhead{foo}{draftdate}{}{}

makeoddhead{foo}{}{}{draftdate}



makeevenhead{plain}{draftdate}{}{}

makeoddhead{plain}{}{}{draftdate}



begin{document}

pagestyle{foo}



noindent Title Page Stuff



clearpage



noindent Copyright Page Stuff



clearpage



pagestyle{plain}

lipsum

end{document}

This however, is not a full solution, since I want later empty pages created with cleardoublepage or inserted between chapters to also have the timestamp.

Interestingly, using a header like makeoddhead{empty}{}{any text}{draftdate} works correctly.

What is happening here?

In memoir the empty style have a slightly special setup. All pagestyle, except empty gets some struts added for consistency. The empty style does not, otherwise you cannot create a doc where the text block is almost the same size as paper size (at least not without memoir warning about it).

The missing struts in the empty style can lead to unpredictable behaviour as you have already seen.

It is rather rare users mess with the empty style, but if you want to, this is the proper method: (a) First create a new empty page style, with a name different from empty:

makepagestyle{myempty}

This is now an empty page style with struts.

Next overwrite the existing empty style:

copypagestyle{empty}{myempty}  

Then add your changes to empty.

Personally, I would not use the header/footers to add draft information. I'd use a package that can place stuff at an absolution position on all pages. Even though it an old package, my go to is often eso-pic.

Or you can combine the page style and eso-pic (or similar packages) to only have this information on the start of chapters (adding it to the chapter style. I use this in a book to add last changed information to each chapter (separate files) from my subversion archive.

Here's a fix. (While this answer provides a workaround and observations of what works/doesn't work, @daleif says that you should really be creating a new style, such as myempty, rather than using empty).

Replace:

makeoddhead{empty}{}{}{draftdate}

with:

makeoddhead{empty}{}{~}{draftdate}

That's it!

Now, lets look at the behavior. It seems to stem from the right-side section of the header. This behavior appears to affect both makeevenhead{empty}{}{}{} and makeoddhead{empty}{}{}{}.

Using makeoddhead{empty}{draftdate}{}{} (no problem):

Using makeoddhead{empty}{}{draftdate}{} (no problem):

Using makeoddhead{empty}{}{}{draftdate} (WHAT??):

Using makeoddhead{empty}{draftdate}{test}{} (no problem):

Using makeoddhead{empty}{draftdate}{}{test} (WHAT??):

Using makeoddhead{empty}{}{draftdate}{test} (no problem):

Sooooo, as you can see, there are two headers that behave in different ways for the right header within the empty page styles in memoir:

• the right-only header


• the left and right header

Therefore, if you want to use only the right header or the right header with the left header, you can trick it. Bypass the issue by putting a space into the center header slot!