How to create a simple title list/page in tex?

Question

Are there any standard tex style wrappers that can help to create a title page for diploma or coursework? My main objective is to get some shortcuts for creating title, author name etc. Some help on the table of contents would be appreciated, too.

Answer 1

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.