Why does the text begins in the middle

Question

I am making a project. When I made a frontpage and a table of content my text does not begin from the top of the page.

Can someone help me to fix it

Welcome to TeX.SX! It's normal that the chapter heading starts a bit down the page. — egreg, Dec 20 '14 at 16:45
You must know that the table of contents uses \chapter*. Hence, as @egreg said, the TOC heading looks like all the other chapter headings. — Ruben, Dec 20 '14 at 17:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

By default chapter headings start a bit lower on the page which simply is a matter of the typographical design that was set in the LaTeX core. If you want to change it you can have a look at the question Space before chapters and contents.

Regarding your question about the table of contents: The macro generating it, \tableofcontents (assuming that you use the standard classes) is defined like:

\newcommand\tableofcontents{%
    \if@twocolumn
      \@restonecoltrue\onecolumn
    \else
      \@restonecolfalse
    \fi
    \chapter*{\contentsname
        \@mkboth{%
           \MakeUppercase\contentsname}{\MakeUppercase\contentsname}}%
    \@starttoc{toc}%
    \if@restonecol\twocolumn\fi
    }

As you see, after checking for twocolumn-mode it calls the \chapter(*) macro and then icludes the .toc file via \@starttoc. That's why your table of contents starts as low as the first pages of the chapters in your document.

Why does the text begins in the middle

1 Answers1