Friday, January 30, 2009

LaTeX title page

A document is usually divided into several parts. One of the part is the title page. To produce the title page, use the \maketitle command. The format of the title page will depends on the document class used, such as article, book or report.

A document title page usually consists of several items: title, author(s), date, and some footnote. The first item is the title. The command to use is \title{}. A standard LaTeX format for the title page will align all entries centered on the lines in which they appear. The title will be broken up automatically, if the title is too long. To manually break the title, please use the \\ command. For example, title{...\\...\\...}.

The second item is the author(s). To display the author, use the \author{} command. If there are several authors, separate their name with and from one another. For example \author{S. Kasim \and P. Ramli}. The author names will be printed in parallel next to each other on the same line. Replace \and with \\ to display the author(s) on top of one another.

To include the address, use the \\ command, such as
\author{S. Kasim\\Company\\Address
\and
P. Ramli\\Company\\Address}
Extra item such as telephone number or email may be produce in the footnote via the \thanks{} command. For example, \author{S. Kasim\thanks{Tel. 03--3367638}}.

The last item is the date, which can be produced using the \date{} command. If the \date{} command is omitted, then the current date is printed automatically below the author entries on the title page.

An example of a title page

\documentclass{article}

\title{A simple LaTeX title page}

\author{
S. Kasim \thanks{Tel. 03--3367638}\\Company1\\Address1
\and
P. Ramli \thanks{Email. ramli@ramli.com}\\Company2\\Address2
}

\date{Kuala Lumpur, \today}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\end{document}