# Adjust space above for only one align

In my document I have many align environments which look great as they are. Now I have one starting on a new page and because of the space above it looks weird compared to other pages because the content starts much lower than on other ones.

I know that I can adjust the space before and after aligns with:

\setlength{\abovedisplayskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\belowdisplayskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\abovedisplayshortskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\belowdisplayshortskip}{0pt}


but this changes the style for all environments. How would I apply this only to one align?

• white space at start of page is always discarded automatically, so if that is not happening there is something wrong with your input, but as you have shown no example it is hard to know. I would guess that what you are seeing is not vertical space but a spurious empty line of text. May 10 '19 at 7:53

You should have really good arguments to do this. But here is how

\begingroup
\setlength{\abovedisplayskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\belowdisplayskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\abovedisplayshortskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\belowdisplayshortskip}{0pt}
align stuff
\endgroup

• Thank you for this. Now I feel guilty. Do you mean with really good arguments that this is a general thing because it breaks consistency within the document or do you think it does not apply to my use case? May 10 '19 at 7:59
• @Cilenco I do not know your use case (and I have used similar approaches before), but you should have a damn good reason to do so. I tend to see this in the same manner as those who ask how to scale down an equation because it does not fit the page. On the other hand, if this is align*, then depending on the conditions, you an save vertical space by using \begin{equation*}\begin{aligned}...\end... instead. May 10 '19 at 9:06
• You should probably show an example of where you wanted to use this (cf Davids comment) May 10 '19 at 9:07