Chapter title placement

Question

How can I delete the white space between the chapter's title and the beginning of the page? That is, how to place a chapter's title the higher possible? I am using the book class.

Answer 1

For the book class, you could redefine the \@makechapterhead. Example:

\documentclass{book}
\begin{document}
\chapter{First}
text

\newpage

text

\makeatletter
\def\@makechapterhead#1{%
  \vspace*{-\baselineskip}% in the original 50\p@, 
  {\parindent \z@ \raggedright \normalfont
    \ifnum \c@secnumdepth >\m@ne
      \if@mainmatter
        \huge\bfseries \@chapapp\space \thechapter
        \par\nobreak
        \vskip 20\p@
      \fi
    \fi
    \interlinepenalty\@M
    \Huge \bfseries #1\par\nobreak
    \vskip 40\p@
  }}
\makeatother

\chapter{Second}
text

\end{document}

With

\makeatletter
\show\@makechapterhead
\makeatother

before redefining \@makechapterhead you can tell LaTeX to show you the current definition of \@makechapterhead. If -\baselineskip still is not enough, you could sum up the lengths \headheight, \headsep, \baselineskip and whatever you want and use the negative of this length for the \vspace*{...}. (Some fixed value like 3cm would be possible, of course, but when you change font size, page size or something else this would need to be changed, too.)