[Tex/LaTex] Decreasing space between title and body in scrartcl

articlekoma-scriptspacing

Here is a MWE using scrartcl. If I just have a title, and no subtitle, author,
date, or any of that other stuff, is there a clean way I can decrease the space between the title and the body, here denoted by a section header?

The maketitle command in scrartcl.cls seems to be very complex. I also noticed that scrlttr2 has a lot of adjustable length parameters called pseudo-lengths which is helpful, but the other classes don't have them. I wonder why.

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\areaset{16.5cm}{31.0cm}
\usepackage[sc,osf]{mathpazo}
\title{Here is A Title}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Summary}
\end{document}

Best Answer

The scrartcl class adds a wealth of vertical spaces:

  • 2em at the top
  • \topsep due to \begin{center}
  • 1.5em after the “subject”, if given
  • .5em after the title
  • 1em after the subtitle, present or not
  • at least \baselineskip+.5em for the author, present or not
  • 1em after the author, present or not
  • 0pt plus 1em after the date, empty or not
  • \topsep due to \end{center}
  • a final 2em

In your case, \baselineskip is 13.6pt, 1em is 11pt and \topsep is 9.0pt plus 3.0pt minus 5.0pt. So after the title you have a vertical space of

5.5 + 11 + 13.6 + 5.5 + 11 + 9 + 22 = 77.6

points, that is more than five and a half full lines.

To that you have to add the space left before a section title (since \maketitle uses \vskip, the \addvspace in front of section titles can't realize there's no space to add.

If I try 

\documentclass{scrartcl}
%\areaset{16.5cm}{31.0cm}
\usepackage[sc,osf]{mathpazo}
\title{Here is A Title}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\vspace{-77.6pt}

some text to show the real space

\bigskip
\hrule
\bigskip

{\centering\sffamily\bfseries\huge Here is A Title\par}

some text to show the real space

\end{document}

I get

enter image description here

You can notice that there's some more space that I probably lost somewhere.

How to remedy to this situation? Asking Markus Kohm to write a better \@maketitle macro.

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