\subtitle doesn't work in article document class

Question

I'm relatively new to TeX but until now I used mostly the beamer class. There I did this:

\documentclass{beamer}
  \title{title}
  \subtitle{subtitle}
  \author{name}
  \date{\today}
\begin{document}
    %content
\end{document}

And it worked as I would expect but when I use the article class the subtitle does not work.

So it seems that a) I got something wrong or b) it's not the right document class. So I ask you guys:

How do I use a subtitle in the article class?

or

Which document class should I use for my document? I'm attempting to write a document with 50 to 100 pages. It will be a documentation for a programming project so it will contain code snippets and diagrams.

Answer 1

If you used scrartcl instead of article, the command \subtitle would immediately work as expected. scrartcl belongs to the KOMA-Script classes which are extended replacements of the LaTeX standard classes. I strongly recommend KOMA-Script. For reasons have a look at:

• Most useful additions in KOMA-Script

Your document is considerably large. An article-like class may be ok (scrartcl), but if you need a chapter-like sectioning you could consider to use report (or scrreprt, which is a KOMA class).

You might be interested in the answers to this question:

• What are your favorite document classes and what do you use them for?
• What are the available “documentclass” types and their uses?

Answer 2

To supplement Stefan's answer, the core LaTeX article class does not have a \subtitle macro. You can therefore either do something like

\title{Title \\ Subtitle}

or consider the titlepage environment. Other document classes, notably KOMA-Script, do have a separate \subtitle macro available.

Answer 3

A fully adapted possibility for the subtitle generation in the document class article includes reducing the fontsize in the subtitle, as @Seamus mentioned above, but relatively (!), and increasing the distance between title and subtitle. Therefore my suggestion is following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{relsize}

\title{Experimental Test\\[0.2em]\smaller{}Stimuli generation}

\begin{document}
    \maketitle
    My document
\end{document}

If you want a "fully" adaptable title: relative size and line separation can be adapted

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{relsize}


\newcommand{\subtitlerelsize}{1} %relative size: integer value
\newcommand{\subtitlelinesep}{0.2em} %line separation: a LaTeX length

\title{Experimental Test\\[\subtitlelinesep]%
    \smaller[\subtitlerelsize]{}Stimuli generation}

\begin{document}
    \maketitle
    My document
\end{document}