Creating a title page using \vspace or \vskip

Question

I'm creating a title page and I'm asking if it's more convenient to use \vspace or \vskip to have distance between title, author and other elements in the page.

Answer 1

\vspace is essentially a LaTeX wrapper around the primitive \vskip, but it sports a few differences.

1. \vspace doesn't end a paragraph, while \vskip does;

2. \vspace has the *-variant, which \vskip doesn't;

3. \vspace protects the user from possible ambiguous input (see What is the difference between \vskip and \vspace? for an example).

So the answer is: use \vspace, but always precede it with a blank line (or a \par command) when you want to separate with vertical spaces two objects.

Note that \vspace* should be used at the top, otherwise this space would vanish at the page break (and even the first page is considered to come after a page break: computer scientists always start counting from 0).

Answer 2

This might be tricky. I would say: use whichever you feel comfortable with. Just some recommendations:

• The whole title should be robust against paper size changes and margin changes.
• This can be done by enclosing it in something like \leavevmode\vfill...\vfill\leavevmode which centers ... vertically on the page.
• For the distances, you can use \vspace{3cm minus 1cm} to make the vertical space shrinkable in the case the title is several lines long for instance and your titlepage would not fit on one page because of that. The minus 1cm part says, how much can be shrinked (removed) from the vertical space if necessary.