[Tex/LaTex] How to painlessly create a custom layout for the title page for pdflatex

thesistitles

For my thesis my university has only a Word template with font sizes and "window" specifications to position title, name, date, etc.

What is the easiest way to layout such thing, if I'm not an expert in creating custom classes and only a basic user of pstricks and tikz?

Best Answer

While it has the disadvantage that it will likely look slightly different from the rest of your document, it does have the advantage that the title page will look like exactly like how the university expects it to be: include a PDF version you created with their Word template.

This can be done with the pdfpages package:

\usepackage{pdfpages}

\begin{document}

\includepdf[pages=-]{titlepage.pdf}

\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Resources for title page and front matter design

http://ctan.org/tex-archive/info/latex-samples/TitlePages This has some great-looking examples, however, the dependencies are all very complicated (i.e. knowing which packages to load in order to compile an example requires familiarity with dozens of packages), and they are also limited to 1 page.

I have taken (some of those examples) in the past and put them as individual examples. You can download these from Here, Here, Here, and Here. I have changed the examples little to work with xepersian package to typeset Persian documents.

[Tex/LaTex] Create a Function that Generates a Title Page

One possibility is to write a little package, say titlepage.sty; in this package you can define some commands to provide the information that you will use for the titlepage and define a command to effectively produce the titlepage.

A little example: since standard LaTeX provides \author, \title, and \date, in the folowing example I only defined \subtitle and \institute in a way completley analogous to the definition of \author.

Once all the preparations have been done, you define your command to produce the titlepage, using the desired formatting for the elements that will be used.

Here's a very simple version of mytitlepage.sty:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{mytitlepage}

\def\subtitle#1{\gdef\@subtitle{#1}}
\def\@subtitle{\@latex@warning@no@line{No \noexpand\subtitle given}}
\def\institute#1{\gdef\@institute{#1}}
\def\@institute{\@latex@warning@no@line{No \noexpand\institute given}}

\newcommand\mytitlepage{%
\clearpage
\thispagestyle{empty}
{\noindent\huge\bfseries\@author\par}
\vspace*{.25\textheight}
{\raggedleft\Huge\itshape\@title\par
\large\normalfont\@subtitle\par}
\vfill
{\Large\noindent\@institute\par\medskip
\noindent\large\@date\par}
\clearpage
}

\endinput

You can save this file in your local tree and then all you have to do is to load the package in the preamble of your document, use the commands to provide the fields and invoke \mytitlepage:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{mytitlepage}

\title{The Title}
\subtitle{The Subtitle}
\author{The Author}
\institute{The Institute}
\date{The date}

\begin{document}

\mytitlepage

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Resources for title page and front matter design

[Tex/LaTex] Create a Function that Generates a Title Page

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