Adjust the margin with the title on top

Question

I am trying to set margin 0.5in for my latex documents. I used:

\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}

and it works perfectly fine. However when I added the title on top of the article, the top margin of the first page (which contains the title) does not seem to be 0.5in anymore but became bigger. Is there anyway to make it to 0.5in since I have a 3-page limit and need to put a lot of things into 3 pages.

Answer 1

You can patch \@maketitle to remove the inserted 2em vertical skip using etoolbox:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\@maketitle}{\null\vskip 2em}{}{}{}
\makeatother

Alternatively, you can also do something crude:

{\def\null\vskip 2em{}\maketitle}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in,showframe]{geometry}

\title{A title}
\author{An author}

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\@maketitle}{\null\vskip 2em}{}{}{}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\maketitle% or...
% {\def\null\vskip 2em{}\maketitle}

\lipsum[1-17]

\end{document}