On 10/07/2009 10:53 AM, Rob wrote:
Hi,
I'm using the article document class and want to alter the title page. In
particular, for many reasons I don't want to use the author environments, but
rather list the authors and affiliations as standard text. However, when I do
this, the vertical spacing is off. And when I insert vertical spacing between
each author, it's not recognized (whether it's protected or not).
How can I specify vertical spacing for my standard text on my title page?
This kind of question has been much discussed on the list. The short
answer is that there is no simple way to do this. The design of the
title page is specified by the document class and is not intended to be
customized within the document. So lots of things you might try simply
won't work, as LaTeX will ignore them.
So, if you want to customize the title page, you have four options.
1. The Easy Option: Try some other classes, such as paper or
koma-script, and see if you like their title pages better.
2. The Steve Litt Option: Turn off the title page and make one
manually, not using the Title and Author environments to do so but
by just making it your first page and then "fingerpainting" it.
(Yet another option: Do the title page in OpenOffice, or some such
thing, and then add it to the PDF later, using some appropriate
tool.) This works, but is suitable only for one-off projects,
i.e., if you need a special title page for this article but won't
reuse it.
3. The LaTeX Way: Redefine the \maketitle command that is used to
make the title page. You can look in article.cls to see how it is
defined, and then put a \renewcommand\maketitle{...} into your
preamble or, better yet, into a package or even a LyX module that
you can then easily reuse. This is the most reusable option, but
requires the most work, especially if your LaTeX skills are less
than what they might be.
4. The Other LaTeX Way: Decide that it doesn't really matter very
much what the title page looks like, and that anyway maybe the
designers of the article class knew more than we do about
typesetting, so we're likely just to make a hash of it.
Your choice, of course.
Richard
