Changing \maketitle positions using memoir

Question

I am relatively new to LATEX...I have been formatting a book... and the author requires the title page to be ... his name at the top, the book's name at the center and date at bottom of the page...

So this inverts the position of the texts..

All I could do so far...was changing it in photoshop, and adding the title page as a PDF....

here it is..

\documentclass[12pt,twoside,openany,a5paper]{memoir} %Classe estilo memoir
\usepackage{pdfpages} %Usado pra incluir pag de pdf no doc

\title{The Book Title}
\author{John Doe}
\date{\today}

\begin{document} 
    %\maketitle %título
    \includepdf[pages={1}]{Title.pdf}
\end{document}

My question is...Is there a way to do it in LATEX? customizing the position of the texts?

Answer 1

In any LaTeX class, \title, \author, and \date actually set the values of internal macros (\@title, \@author, \@date in article class). The class comes with \maketitle predefined to typeset the values of those commands in a particular format.

Memoir gives you an advantage by adding a titlingpage environment, and by making the values of the title, author, and date, available with normal commands \thetitle, \theauthor, and \thedate. (Normal as opposed to internal commands containing the @ symbol, which requires special treatment.)

So you can put your \maketitle inside a titlingpage environment, and then you can redefine \maketitle to have whatever format you want, using those values (or others that you might devise).

Here's a simple example just using a center environment and basic spacing commands. The \vspace*{\fill} commands put as much vertical space as possible between the elements, so they fill the page. Instead you could do any amount of space you wanted, like \vspace*{3\baselineskip} or \vspace*{2in}. (You could also vary the font sizes, add boldface or italic, use \MakeTextUppercase{} if you wanted all caps, etc.)

\documentclass{memoir}

\title{My Book}
\author{My Name}
\date{\today}

\renewcommand{\maketitle}{%
  \begin{center}
  {\Large\theauthor}\par
  \vspace*{\fill}
  {\Huge\textbf{\thetitle}}\par
  \vspace*{\fill}
  \thedate
  \end{center}
}


\begin{document}

\begin{titlingpage}
\maketitle
\end{titlingpage}

\end{document}