Set position for \maketitle in article

Question

I want to create a handout to support a speech I have to give.

Since I am only familiar with the \documentclass{article}, I wrote the following code:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\PrerenderUnicode{äöüÄÖÜß}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}

\title{Some title}
\author{A. Uthor}
\date{2.7.2012}
\pagestyle{headings}
\begin{document}    
    \vspace*{-5pt}
    \maketitle

    \subsection*{Text \& Author}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item foobar
    \end{itemize}

\end{document}

What I want is to have the title, author, date etc. directly on the upper edge of the paper. I understand, there will be more elegant ways to solve this, anyway: This \vspace*{-5pt} generates an empty page before the actual content of my handout.

Why does it, how can I prevent it to do or (which would be best to know) what is the more elegant way?

Answer 1

article class defines the single column version of \maketitle to effectively begin with \newpage You could redefine \maketitle but simpler, for a one-off document is just locally disable \newpage

 \begin{document}    
    \vspace*{-5pt}
    {\let\newpage\relax\maketitle}
\subsection*{Text \& Author}    

does what you need

Answer 2

You have to redefine the \@maketitle macro so that it doesn't add vertical spaces (for example, not using the center environment):

\makeatletter
\def\@maketitle{%
  \newpage
  \vspace*{-\topskip}      % remove the initial space
  \begingroup\centering    % instead of \begin{center}
  \let \footnote \thanks
  \hrule height \z@        % to avoid the insertion of lineskip glue
    {\LARGE \@title \par}%
    \vskip 1.5em 
    {\large
      \lineskip .5em 
      \begin{tabular}[t]{c}%
        \@author
      \end{tabular}\par}%
    \vskip 1em 
    {\large \@date}%
  \par\endgroup            % instead of \end{center}
  \vskip 1.5em             % <--- modify this to adjust the separation
}
\makeatother

The last \vskip command is responsible for the separation between the title and the text.

Answer 3

The titling package provides a simple user interface to titling information, and allows you to restyle both the \title and the \thanks, including moving their position.

The package provides a \droptitle length which determines the height of the title line relative to the default. In your case you want to move the title up, so you can supply a negative space. In the example below I've loaded the geometry package with the [showframe] option just to show the relative positioning on the page.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\PrerenderUnicode{äöüÄÖÜß}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}

\usepackage{titling}
\setlength{\droptitle}{-2cm}
\title{Some title}
\author{A. Uthor}
\date{2.7.2012}
\pagestyle{headings}
\begin{document}    
    \maketitle

    \subsection*{Text \& Author}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item foobar
    \end{itemize}

\end{document}