Like Martin said in his comment, there are standard LaTeX commands for creating simple title pages, available in many document classes. Here's a complete example:
\documentclass{book}
\begin{document}
\title{Example document}
\author{Stefan Kottwitz}
\date{\today}
\maketitle
\end{document}
I recommend using those macros \title
etc. right after \begin{document}
, but not before. The reason is, that some packages, such as babel, provide features which are activated as soon as the document begins. And such text features, such as shorthands or hyphenation tools, could be useful also in title and author field.
For more flexible title pages you could use the titlepage
environment, this gives you a blank page without page number and without header, which you could freely design. For example:
\documentclass{book}
\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
\vfill
\centering
{\Huge Example document}\\[1cm]
{\Large Stefan Kottwitz}\\[0.6cm]
\today
\vfill
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}
The titling
package gives you further control about LaTeX's titling features.
Redefine the "title making" macro:
\usepackage{tocloft}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@cftmaketoctitle}{}
\makeatother
Best Answer
there are several possible solutions:
Use a different class.
article
orscrartcl
would be good place to start. Can not remember if areport
class would do what you want.Redefine
\maketitle
This should redefine
\maketitle
, so that it would be possible to put\tableofcontents
on the same page. You should play a bit more to get the spacings right. On how to create custom title pages you should read the LaTeX WikibookEDIT: I edited it to fix some silly typos, but It did not achieve what was wanted. the command Table of Contents is clearing a double page, which is making everything worse.
Take a glimpse to the KOMA Script document classes, the
scrbook
class is much more flexible and it might be possible to customize it to fit your requirements without implementing any ugly hacks.