21

I'm writing my thesis using a twoside report. However, when it comes to the title page I think I want to have it centered i.e. the left margin and the right margin to be equal. How can I achieve this for the title page only?

This is a minimum working example demonstrating what I mean:

\documentclass[11pt,twoside,a4paper]{report}

\title{The title of my thesis}
\author{My name \\ \\ \\ \emph{Supervisor:} \\ My supervisor's name \\ \\}
\date{\today}

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

Thanks in advance!

lockstep
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DoubleTrouble
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2 Answers2

18

There is a difference between titlepage and the cover of a thesis.

The titlepage is inside your thesis and should obey the default layout.

The cover is usually outside and can/should be centered. To get a centered cover my approach is to separate it in a second tex document and include it with pdfpages.

\includepdf{cover/cover.pdf}

And my cover.tex

\documentclass[
    pdftex,
    fontsize=11pt,
    a4paper
   ]{scrbook}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[a4paper,includeall,bindingoffset=0cm,margin=2cm,
            marginparsep=0cm,marginparwidth=0cm]{geometry}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
\thispagestyle{empty}
    ...
\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

This approach is preferable because often you have to hand in cover and the thesis as separate files for print and you don't have to manipulate the default type area.

schlamar
  • 738
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  • This is a really clever solution! I will be using this alot, thanks! – DoubleTrouble May 30 '12 at 20:30
  • Including geometry without options still changes the margins (and thus f*cks up my classicthesis document). Any way to avoid that and only have it apply to that one page? – oarfish Aug 13 '15 at 12:54
13

You can use geometry for this:

\documentclass[11pt,twoside,a4paper]{report}
\usepackage[margin=1in,bindingoffset=.2in,showframe]{geometry} %% Remove showframe in your document

\title{The title of my thesis}
\author{My name \\[5ex] \emph{Supervisor:} \\ My supervisor's name \\[2ex]}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
\newgeometry{margin=1in}
\maketitle
\restoregeometry
\end{document}

enter image description here

Note: Instead of using \\ \\ \\ etc. you can issue \\[5ex] to leave extra line space.

  • The manual setting of the type area is not preferable in general as long as you don't have strict presets from your department. See the documentation of the Koma-Script package for a guideline about setting the type area. – schlamar May 24 '12 at 11:47
  • This is a really clever solution! I will be using this alot, thanks! – KcFnMi Apr 29 '19 at 16:41