W3cubDocs

\maketitle

Synopsis:

\maketitle

Generate a title. In the standard classes the title appears on a separate page, except in the article class where it is at the top of the first page. (See Document class options, for information about the titlepage document class option.)

This example shows \maketitle appearing in its usual place, immediately after \begin{document}.

\documentclass{article}
\title{Constructing a Nuclear Reactor Using Only Coconuts}
\author{Jonas Grumby\thanks{%
    With the support of a Ginger Grant from the Roy Hinkley Society.} \\
  Skipper, \textit{Minnow}
  \and
  Willy Gilligan\thanks{%
    Thanks to the Mary Ann Summers foundation
    and to Thurston and Lovey Howell.}           \\
  Mate, \textit{Minnow}
  }
\date{1964-Sep-26}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship. The mate was
a mighty sailin' man, the Skipper brave and sure. Five passengers set
sail that day for a three hour tour. A three hour tour.
  ...

You tell LaTeX the information used to produce the title by making the following declarations. These must come before the \maketitle, either in the preamble or in the document body.

\author{name1 \and name2 \and ...}

Required. Declare the document author or authors. The argument is a list of authors separated by \and commands. To separate lines within a single author’s entry, for instance to give the author’s institution or address, use a double backslash, \\. If you omit the \author declaration then you get ‘LaTeX Warning: No \author given’.

\date{text}

Optional. Declare text to be the document’s date. The text doesn’t need to be in a date format; it can be any text at all. If you omit \date then LaTeX uses the current date (see \today). To have no date, instead use \date{}.

\thanks{text}

Optional. Produce a footnote. You can use it in the author information for acknowledgements as illustrated above, but you can also use it in the title, or any place a footnote makes sense. It can be any text at all so you can use it for any purpose, such as to print an email address.

\title{text}

Required. Declare text to be the title of the document. Get line breaks inside text with a double backslash, \\. If you omit the \title declaration then you get ‘LaTeX Error: No \title given’.

To make your own title page, see titlepage. You can either create this as a one-off or you can include it as part of a renewed \maketitle command. (Many publishers will provide a class to use in place of article that formats the title according to their house requirements.)