The style of a page determines where LaTeX places the components of that page, such as headers and footers, and the text body. This includes pages in the main part of the document but also includes special pages such as the title page of a book, a page from an index, or the first page of an article.
The package fancyhdr is very helpful for constructing page styles. See its documentation on CTAN.
\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.)
\pagenumbering
Synopsis:
\pagenumbering{number-style}
Specifies the style of page numbers, and resets the page number. The numbering style is reflected on the page, and also in the table of contents and other page references. This declaration has global scope so its effect is not delimited by braces or environments.
In this example, before the Main section the pages are numbered ‘a’, etc. Starting on the page containing that section, the pages are numbered ‘1’, etc.
\begin{document}\pagenumbering{alph} ... \section{Main}\pagenumbering{arabic} ...
The argument number-style is one of the following (see also \alph \Alph \arabic \roman \Roman \fnsymbol).
arabic
Arabic numerals: 1, 2, …
roman
lowercase Roman numerals: i, ii, …
Roman
uppercase Roman numerals: I, II, …
alph
lowercase letters: a, b, … If you have more than 26 pages then you get ‘LaTeX Error: Counter too large’.
Alph
uppercase letters: A, B, … If you have more than 26 pages then you get ‘LaTeX Error: Counter too large’.
gobble
LaTeX does not output a page number, although it
does get reset. References to that page also are blank. (This does not
work with the popular package hyperref so to have the page number
not appear you may want to instead use \pagestyle{empty}
or
\thispagestyle{empty}
.)
Traditionally, if a document has front matter—preface, table of contents, etc.—then it is numbered with lowercase Roman numerals. The main matter of a document uses arabic. See \frontmatter & \mainmatter & \backmatter.
If you want to address where the page number appears on the page,
see \pagestyle. If you want to change the value of page
number then you will manipulate the page
counter
(see Counters).
\pagestyle
Synopsis:
\pagestyle{style}
Declaration that specifies how the page headers and footers are typeset, from the current page onwards.
A discussion with an example is below. Note first that the package fancyhdr is now the standard way to manipulate headers and footers. New documents that need to do anything other than one of the standard options below should use this package. See its documentation on CTAN.
Values for style:
plain
The header is empty. The footer contains only a page number, centered.
empty
The header and footer is empty.
headings
Put running headers and footers on each page. The document style specifies what goes in there; see the discussion below.
myheadings
Custom headers, specified via the \markboth
or the
\markright
commands.
Some discussion of the motivation for LaTeX’s mechanism will help you
work with the options headings
or myheadings
. The
document source below produces an article, two-sided, with the pagestyle
headings
. On this document’s left hand pages, LaTeX wants (in
addition to the page number) the title of the current section. On its
right hand pages LaTeX wants the title of the current subsection.
When it makes up a page, LaTeX gets this information from the
commands \leftmark
and \rightmark
. So it is up to
\section
and \subsection
to store that information there.
\documentclass[twoside]{article} \pagestyle{headings} \begin{document} ... \section{Section 1} ... \subsection{Subsection 1.1} ... \section{Section 2} ... \subsection{Subsection 2.1} ... \subsection{Subsection 2.2} ...
Suppose that the second section falls on a left page. Although when the page starts it is in the first section, LaTeX will put ‘Section 2’ in the left page header. As to the right header, if no subsection starts before the end of the right page then LaTeX blanks the right hand header. If a subsection does appear before the right page finishes then there are two cases. If at least one subsection starts on the right hand page then LaTeX will put in the right header the title of the first subsection starting on that right page. If at least one of 2.1, 2.2, …, starts on the left page but none starts on the right then LaTeX puts in the right hand header the title of the last subsection to start, that is, the one in effect during the right hand page.
To accomplish this, in a two-sided article, LaTeX has \section
issue a command \markboth
, setting \leftmark
to ‘Section 2’ and setting \rightmark
to blank.
And, LaTeX has \subsection
issue a command \markright
,
setting \rightmark
to ‘Subsection 2.1’, etc.
Here are the descriptions of \markboth
and \markright
:
\markboth{left-head}{right-head}
Sets both the right hand and left hand heading information for either a
page style of headings
or myheadings
. A left hand page
heading left-head is generated by the last \markboth
command before the end of the page. A right hand page heading
right-head is generated by the first \markboth
or
\markright
that comes on the page if there is one, otherwise by
the last one that came before that page.
\markright{right}
Sets the right hand page heading, leaving the left unchanged.
\thispagestyle
Synopsis:
\thispagestyle{style}
Works in the same way as the \pagestyle
(see \pagestyle),
except that it changes to style for the current page only. This
declaration has global scope, so its effect is not delimited by braces
or environments.
Often the first page of a chapter or section has a different style. For
example, this LaTeX book document has the first page of the first
chapter in plain
style, as is the default (see Page styles).
\documentclass{book} \pagestyle{headings} \begin{document} \chapter{First chapter} ... \chapter{Second chapter}\thispagestyle{empty} ...
The plain
style has a page number on it, centered in the footer.
To make the page entirely empty, the command
\thispagestyle{empty}
immediately follows the second
\chapter
.