Shift title and author text up?

Question

What is the best way to shift the title text 'up' in a LaTeX document compiled with pdftex? When I do this:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper, onecolumn]{article}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0in}
\title{Blah Blah Cool}
\date {}

\begin{document}
    \maketitle
    \section{Foo}
    foobar foobar foobar...
\end{document}

There is a quite a bit of space between the very top of the page and the title ("Blah Blah Cool"). How can I decrease/remove this space?

Answer 1

The titling package might help.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{titling}

\setlength{\droptitle}{-10em}   % This is your set screw

\author{The Author}
\title{The Title}

\begin{document}
  \maketitle
\end{document}

See the package manual for more details.

Answer 2

Lengths like \topmargin influence the general margins of a document (although using packages like geometry is the preferred way to do so). To remove the spacing at the start of a title created with \maketitle (and without using the titlepage option of the article class), one may alter the definition of the internal class command \@maketitle. In the following example, I've included the original definition and deleted two lines that otherwise would produce the vertical space.

EDIT: You may wonder what do \makeatletter and \makeatother do.

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper,onecolumn]{article}

\makeatletter
\def\@maketitle{%
  \newpage
%  \null% DELETED
%  \vskip 2em% DELETED
  \begin{center}%
  \let \footnote \thanks
    {\LARGE \@title \par}%
    \vskip 1.5em%
    {\large
      \lineskip .5em%
      \begin{tabular}[t]{c}%
        \@author
      \end{tabular}\par}%
    \vskip 1em%
    {\large \@date}%
  \end{center}%
  \par
  \vskip 1.5em}
\makeatother

\title{Blah Blah Cool}
\date {}

\begin{document}
    \maketitle
    \section{Foo}
    foobar foobar foobar...
\end{document}

Answer 3

Instead of using \author, \title, \date, and \maketitle, you can simply design your own title:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper, onecolumn]{article}

\begin{document}

\begingroup  
  \centering
  \LARGE Blah Blah Cool\\[1.5em]
  \large The Author\par
\endgroup

\section{Foo}
    foobar foobar foobar...

\end{document}