Adding vertical space at the start of a page

Question

I'd like to, first thing before writing anything on a page, add some vertical space.

Minimal (non)working example:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\vspace{250px}
I want to be further down on the page :(

\vspace{250px}
Haha! Sucker :D
\end{document}

How can I get the first \vspace to work, just like the second one?

Answer 1

The space added by \vspace is deleted at the beginning of the page, as you have seen. The command \vspace* adds the space that is not deleted.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\vspace*{250px}
I want to be further down on the page :(

\vspace{250px}
Haha! Sucker :D
\end{document}

Answer 2

Spaces at page breaks are swallowed, as usually one doesn't want them. TeX starts counting from zero, so the first page is after a page break. :)

The solution is to issue \vspace* instead of \vspace.

I recommend not to use px which is not what one with a CSS background would expect. Use rather cm, mm or in or multiples of \baselineskip:

\vspace*{2cm}
\vspace*{4\baselineskip}

The default value of 1px is just 1bp (where 72bp = 1in); it's a special unit of measure that can be tailored for specific applications concerning on-screen only documents. For example, to make a document as wide as a 1200 pixel screen at 96dpi, one can pass geometry a paper width of 1200px by

\pdfpxdimen=1in % just to start the computation
\divide\pdfpxdimen by 96 % 96 px are now 1in
\geometry{paperwidth=1200px}

For "paper" document, this is irrelevant.

Answer 3

In addition to the flurry of \vspace* suggestions, you could also issue a "nothing" command to allow subsequent \vspaces to typeset as expected. This "nothing" command could be an \mbox{} (an empty box) or \null, provided that you leave an empty line (or \par) to be in vertical mode.

More specifically, you would need

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\mbox{}% or \null; note the blank line below. Alternative, add \par on this line.

\vspace{250px}
I want to be further down on the page :(
\end{document}

although \null is a better choice - it does not require the blank line or even \par.

Answer 4

I did try to post this as a comment, but it didn’t fit, not even in a more succint version... :-(

I chanced upon this question, and, while reading the answers and the comments, I thought that it would be worthwhile to add a reference to the following two questions:

• Why does \vspace*{0pt} add vertical space?
• A fix for \vspace*, does it break other things?

Note, besides, that @egreg’s comment, that recommends to avoid using \mbox{}, and to use \null instead, is not entirely correct: it is true that \null doesn’t require to be followed by a blank line (or by a \par); it is true that it is much more efficient, in that it avoids starting a new paragraph and adding one level of boxing; but it is not true that the two solutions yield different results. Indeed, both end up adding to the main vertical list the following things (omitting some items for simplicity):

• the \topskip glue;

• a zero-height \hbox;

• the skip specified in the argument of \vspace;

• the \parskip glue;

• the \baselineskip glue;

• what comes next.

(The above claim can be easily verified with \showlists.)