Should I place \title, \author, \date in the preamble or after \begin{document}?

Question

The motivation for this question

Forgive me if this looks very basic to you but nobody has pointed out to me yet until now in a comment to a question that the \title command (and thus the other two metadata commands \author and \date) should be placed in the preamble. My practice up to this point is to write them after \begin{document}. In titling's \thetitle, \theauthor and \thedate don't work and Best practice on organising your preamble, user doncherry mentioned to write them "towards the end" of the preamble.

I consulted lshort again and it seems to go towards putting these in the preamble. Here is an example code taken from lshort (page 8 in the English version).

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
% define the title
\author{H.~Partl}
\title{Minimalism}
\begin{document}
% generates the title
\maketitle
% insert the table of contents
\tableofcontents
\section{Some Interesting Words}
Well, and here begins my lovely article.
\section{Good Bye World}
\ldots{} and here it ends.
\end{document}

However, in some on-line tutorials like this one, they are written after \begin{document}.

The question:

What is the standard practice and are there advantages or disadvantages to each of these usage?

I am aware, for example, of the answers in the above-mentioned posts; but apart from these, are there more things to consider? For one, I don't get compile errors or warnings in most cases. Although I can't remember when I had such compile errors when these commands are written elsewhere where they are not intended to be written.

Answer 1

Conceptually, these are 'meta-data' about the document, rather than part of the document itself. As such, I prefer to set them in the preamble.

As others have noted there is no technical reason to prefer one method over the other with the standard classes and in the absence of packages which alter category codes. With classes which issue \maketitle automatically, it may however be essential to set \author, etc. in the preamble. The same is true if the meta-data is being picked up by for example hyperref for addition to the PDF information.

Answer 2

With package babel it is always better to use it after \begin{document}. Then the shorthands are active and can be used for hyphenation points:

\documentclass[11pt]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}  
\begin{document}
\title{Das ist ein Mustertext, der dazu da ist, um Textsatz"=Problematik
    bzw. Textsatz"=Schwierigkeit eindeutig zu demonstrieren}
\author{foo}
\maketitle
\end{document}

In the preamble you have to set the title without using the shorthands:

\documentclass[11pt]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}  
\title{Das ist ein Mustertext, der dazu da ist, um Textsatz-Problematik
    bzw. Textsatz-Schwierigkeit eindeutig zu demonstrieren}
\author{foo}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

It is possible to activate the shorthands in the preamble before the \title is used, but that is one more command and can cause other problems ...

Answer 3

Try this:

\documentclass{tufte-book}
\begin{document}
\title{This is a test}

\end{document}

As you can observe, some classes are opiniated and want you to place it in the preamble. From memory it may also affect other packages such as hyperref. Best place it where Leslie Lamport thought it belonged i.e., in the preamble.

Answer 4

IIRC, you won't be able to use babel shorthands if your \title etc. are in the preamble unless you use external packages to enable it. Of course, with many people using sufficiently rich encodings anyway, this becomes less and less of a problem.

Answer 5

Some classes require \title, \author and similar declarations to be placed after \begin{document}. An example is revtex which is a standard class for submission of scientific papers to physical journals of APS, AIP, etc. IMHO, it is better to put these commands in the preamble. For some reasons revtex uses a different approach. I don't know exactly why. Maybe, bacause \begin{abstract}...\end{abstract} should go before \maketytle in this class.

Answer 6

I will elevate my comment to an answer and make a few corrections and additions:

In Leslie Lamport's sample file (sample2e.tex; thinking of it as THE original), the commands are set immediately after the \documentclass. Since it in many cases does not matter (see the other replies for cases the contrary), I prefer to set it after the \begin{document} to keep it close to other document content (I often end up changing the title in response to changes in the text). On the other hand setting it close to the top makes the title show as soon as one opens the document which may be an advantage. So there are good reasons for different solutions.

Answer 7

That's no difference where you place them. They just should be before \maketitle.