How to painlessly create a custom layout for the title page for pdflatex?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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}

Answer 2

The textpos package makes the absolute positioning of "text boxes" fairly easy. I have used it to prepare flyers, posters, etc.

Answer 3

If it's for a one off solution, you can use minipage to typeset individual "windows" with specific widths.

Then tweak the vertical spacing between those windows using the \vspace*{2cm} command. Of course you can specify whatever separation you want, other than 2cm, and even negative lengths.

With the geometry package you can also get the proper margins around the whole page.

Answer 4

The memoir package has some nice layout options. It takes a little of reading and the learning curve is rather steep but the results can be amazing.

Answer 5

I did it by using titlepage environment, along with center, enlarged \baselineskip and many \vskip 0pt plus.5fil and similar primitives; have a look here for inspiration, it looked like this.