[Tex/LaTex] Making a title page with a subtitle in Memoir

Question

This is my first ever posting. I am quite new to LaTeX but have recently written a book in it. I have got the whole thing set up, including margins, page size and everything. But the title page has defeated me.

I have used the \maketitle command, and it makes quite a good page. But my book has a subtitle, which I would like to include between the title and my name. I have looked around the internet for hours, and as far as I can see, you need to be a LaTeX expert to do this. I have tried pasting in the code from the memoir title page examples here: ftp://tug.org/tex-archive/info/latex-samples/TitlePages/titlepages.pdf, but none of them seem to work.

So I wondered whether anyone could help me. All I want is a page that is very like the standard \maketitle page, but has a subtitle between the title and the author name.

Answer 1

Although the memoir document class offers a customizable \maketitle command, I'd rather design this page from scratch (this gives more freedom). Here's one possibility using the titlingpage environment and a variation of one of the titles contained in the titlepages document; adjust the settings according to your needs:

\documentclass{memoir}

\newlength\drop
\makeatletter
\newcommand*\titleM{\begingroup% Misericords, T&H p 153
\setlength\drop{0.08\textheight}
\centering
\vspace*{\drop}
{\Huge\bfseries The Title}\\[\baselineskip]
{\scshape the subtitle}\\[\baselineskip]
\vfill
{\large\scshape the author}\par
\vfill
{\scshape \@date}\par
\vspace*{2\drop}
\endgroup}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{titlingpage}
\titleM
\end{titlingpage}

\end{document}

As I mentioned before, another option is to use the various hooks provided by the class to customize the title page using the \maketitle command; here's a simple example using this approach (the hooks and their default definitions can be found in the documentation, pages 62 and 63):

\documentclass{memoir}

\pretitle{\begin{center}\Huge\bfseries}
\title{The Title}
\posttitle{\par\vskip1em{\normalfont\normalsize\scshape the subtitle\par\vfill}\end{center}}
\author{The Author}
\predate{\vfill\begin{center}\large}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlingpage}
\maketitle
\end{titlingpage}

\end{document}