What is a good practice to achieve vertical placement? (e.g. a Titlepage)

Question

My titlepage looks right now like this:

using this code:

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,oneside,titlepage,german,final]{scrreprt}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{stfloats}
\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}

\begin{flushright}
\textbf{\textsc{University XY}}\\
{\small{\textsf{Department Z\\}}}
\end{flushright}

\begin{center}
\bigskip
{\huge{Masterthesis}}\\
\bigskip
{\huge{\textbf{How to vertical align in Latex}}}\\
\bigskip
{\today}\\
\end{center}

\textbf{Author}
\smallskip
\hrule
\smallskip
\begin{tabular}{ll}
Some: & texts \\ 
\end{tabular}
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}

---

What I would like to know is, how I should define the placements of the text-elements properly and not as some gross, linebreak, lineskip disaster.

Where I would like to place the elemets:

1. the Univerity should stay at the top-right corner, right aligned
2. the author and following, should be at the bottom, left aligned, and in any case stay on this page
3. the title should be at the center between the University and the author
4. Masterthesis should be at between University and title
5. the date should be between title and author
6. I would like to be able to easily move Title, Masterthesis and date (to change their relative vertical distance)

Of course I could hack something, so that the output would met these requirements, but I am looking for a sound, a nice and dynamic solution - lacking of that much experience, I hope someone else has it. Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Here's a proposal:

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,oneside,titlepage,final]{scrreprt}

\newcommand{\centeredelement}[2][]{\begingroup\centering#1#2\par\endgroup}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\begin{flushright}
{\bfseries\scshape University XY}\\
{\small\sffamily Department Z\par}
\end{flushright}

\vspace{\stretch{.25}}

\centeredelement[\huge]{%
  Masterthesis
}

\vspace{\stretch{.25}}

\centeredelement[\huge\bfseries]{%
   How to vertical align in \LaTeX
}

\vspace{\stretch{.25}}

\centeredelement{\today}

\vspace{\stretch{.25}}

\textbf{Author}
\par
\smallskip
\hrule
\smallskip
\begin{tabular}{@{}ll@{}}
Some: & texts \\ 
\end{tabular}
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}

With \centeredelement we set something to the center; the optional argument consists of the font changes to be made.

You can play with the arguments to \stretch; here they are all equal, but you can set them to the fraction of space you prefer between the two elements.