How to have the title at the top of a LaTeX document?

Another way of doing this is not to use \maketitle at all. Instead typeset the author and title in any font you like and enclose the material in stretches:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
   \vspace*{\stretch{1.0}}
   \begin{center}
      \Large\textbf{My title}\\
      \large\textit{A. Thor}
   \end{center}
   \vspace*{\stretch{2.0}}
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}

\begin{titlepage} gives you an empty page. The stretches align the enclosed material vertically. In this case, the whitespace below is twice the size of the whitespace above. Experiment with the two stretch values to fit your needs.


As commented, check if with enough text the title is still too low for you.

If this is true, think twice if you're right. Most "standard" classes have a well designed default style and change this probably is not as elegant as you think. Extra space before of the title emphasized it discrete but effectively. Maybe it is worth to check before similar document class (for example, for an article compare article, paper,scrartcl, etc) and reduce margins (a little) with package geometry.

If despite all you are decided to change the tile format, it is possible add a negative vertical space with \droptitle (that need the package titling) or simply add a \vspace inside the title without extra packages. Uncomment the corresponding lines of this example (remove the first % only of each line) to see the effect of each option:

\documentclass{article} % Try also "scrartcl" or "paper"
\usepackage{blindtext} % for dummy text
% \usepackage[margin=2cm]{geometry}   % to change margins
% \usepackage{titling}             % Uncomment both to   
% \setlength{\droptitle}{-2cm}     % change title position 
\author{Fran}
\title{%\vspace{-1.5cm}            % Another way to do
A Minimal Working Example}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\Blinddocument
\end{document}

Other packages as savetrees or wordlike have global effects in all the document (margins, spacing) but also raises the title.

Of course, you can also make a title from scratch. Redefining \maketitle to put a maximum of information in a page show some ways to do. See also Custom title page in report or book class?

Tags:

Titles