Page Layout ⇒ Vertical Space before Title

[Willie]

Hello,

I am using the article document class. When I use \maketitle an extra vertical space is added before the title. I would like to remove it (have the same vertical space as in other pages). Is there a good way to do this, in the preamble? (not \vspace{-3ex} before the title in the document body)

[localghost]

The easiest method I can think of is to use the titling package.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{titling}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\setlength{\droptitle}{-4em}     % Eliminate the default vertical space
\addtolength{\droptitle}{-4pt}   % Only a guess. Use this for adjustment

\title{The Title}
\author{The Author}

\begin{document}
  \maketitle

  \blinddocument
\end{document}

Thorsten

[Willie]

It's working. Thanks!

btw. How do you know that -4em is the default length? do you have a link to some source?
I looked at the package manual but didn't see that definition.
Isn't there a 'defaultskip' parameter or something?

[localghost]

Actually the default vertical space before the title is 2em. But it is not enough to eliminate only this amount of space. So I doubled it. The added length value of -4pt is to compensate the (rubber) length \partopsep of the center environment that is used to type set the title. Internally this environment is a list and \partopsep is inserted before and after.

The definition of the \maketitle command can be found by looking into the class file itself, that is to say »article.cls« in this case. If you want to find out its location in the TeX installation tree, check out on the command line.

Code: Select all

kpsewhich article.cls

But feeding a search engine with the complete class file name (including suffix) will also do. But the more important thing is the helper macro \@maketitle. It directly determines the appearance of the title.