How to remove a blank page "before" the title page

Question

I'm using MiKTeX 2.9 and TeXniCenter for writing my thesis. I have a lot of packages and everything was going well, until last night that a blank page with ".0" written in the top left corner kept generating before my title page and still I cannot figure out how to remove it. Is there any kind of command that I can use except \let\cleardoublepage\clearpage?

I have been searching heavily but could not find a useful way. I'd appreciate any help.

Answer 1

For what it's worth or if all else fails, you can always remove the first page by adding the following to your document preamble:

\usepackage{atbegshi}% http://ctan.org/pkg/atbegshi
\AtBeginDocument{\AtBeginShipoutNext{\AtBeginShipoutDiscard}}

This should affect only the next shipout at the document start, which defaults to the first page.

Answer 2

Instead of chucking out the problem page, you should avoid generating it in the first place.

You're getting an extra page because something is producing output before \maketitle. You can even see the output: .0, as you report. So, my guess is that somewhere in your header you're assigning a decimal number to a counter that only accepts integers: E.g., 10.0 instead of just 10. The leftovers are treated as text, and printed on the first page. Examine your compilation messages (or .log file if necessary), and you should be able to spot the error. (If the error is ahead of \begin{document}, you'll get a very obvious complaint about that.)

If you have no such assignment in your preamble, then it's hidden in one of the packages you include. How could this happen? Most likely, one package redefines a command that another package then (mis)uses. A bit of experimenting should discover the two culprits. You can often avoid such problems by simply reversing their order of inclusion.

Answer 3

I just discovered the following. Two blank pages before the title were generated when I tried to put blank lines (\ \\) between \author{} and \date{} commands. Namely, the following code generated the extra blank pages:

\title{title}

\author{name}
\ \\
\ \\
\date{year}

\maketitle

and this one did not:

\title{title}

\author{name}
\date{year}

\maketitle

Answer 4

I keep on generating the numbered blank front page upon adding a one-page pdf as external material that served as the document's cover page. I was able to remove the blank front page when I added an even number of pdf pages, indicating the addition of two pages in the options tab with the command:

pages={1-2}

I am using the Tufte template, with two-sided document setting. Adding an odd-numbered appendix would have caused the blank front page.

Answer 5

Try clear all temporary files, then recompile your .Tex file.

Answer 6

Also consider .tex file encoding and line endings. Especially if developing goes under different platforms. For example, I solved similar problem just re-saving .tex file with UTF-8 encoding.

Answer 7

I solved the problem by writing

\begin{titlepage}

\title {My title plus the footnotes}

i.e. I put inside the brackets title plus footnotes and it worked!

Answer 8

Use either titlepage or \maketitle but not both.

Answer 9

If you found symbol ~ in LaTeX file before or after \title, please remove it because it generate blank page before title page