Left and center adjusted text in the first page of dissertation

Question

I am preparing the first page of my dissertation and I want it to looks like below:

                               Title
                              Doctoral
                               2017
                               Approved by:

So, I want all of them to be centered but only '2017' and 'Approved by' be left adjusted. I have tried the following but it did not work:

    \documentclass[12pt]{article}

    \begin{document}

    \pagenumbering{gobble}

    \indent
    \begin{center}  
    \textbf {\large { ESSAYS ON STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT}} \\ 
    \indent by \\
    \textbf {\large {\indent JOHN DOE \\
    \indent DISSERTATION}} \\
    \indent Submitted to the Graduate School \\
    \indent of X State University, \\
    \indent USA \\
    \indent in partial fulfillment of the requirements \\
    \indent for the degree of \\
    \textbf {\large {\indent DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY }} \\
    \indent 2017 
    \end{center}

    \begin{multicols}{2}
    \vfill\null
    \columnbreak    
    \indent
    \small{MAJOR: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT \\
    \indent 
    Approved By: \vspace{2mm}\\
    \indent\rule{8cm}{0.4pt}
    \indent Advisor \hspace{50mm} Date} \vspace{4mm}

    \indent\rule{8cm}{0.4pt} \\

    \indent\rule{8cm}{0.4pt} \\

    \indent\rule{8cm}{0.4pt} \\

    \indent\rule{8cm}{0.4pt} 

    \end{multicols}

    \end{document}

Could you please tell me how can I solve this problem?

Welcome, i don't really know what you are after, but please have a look at How to custmize my titlepage and the lins that are given. Especially https://github.com/johannesbottcher/titlepageExamples/ — Johannes_B, Jul 09 '17 at 17:11
If the stuff provided by @Johannes_B doesn't suite your taste/cover the information you need, could you please provide an image or something like that, illustrating what you want to achieve (maybe with paint/gimp or the like)? — Skillmon, Jul 09 '17 at 17:12
Welcome to TeX.SX! Please help us (and also you) and add a minimal working example (MWE), that illustrates your problem. Reproducing the problem and finding out what the issue is will be much easier when we see compilable code, starting with \documentclass and ending with \end{document}. — Bobyandbob, Jul 09 '17 at 17:20
You can leave out all \indent in the center environment, they don't move anything horizontally. — Skillmon, Jul 09 '17 at 17:47
Please provide an image visualizing what you want. I have no idea up until now and I guess most others don't have one either. — Skillmon, Jul 09 '17 at 18:02
Is there any news here? I don't think you upvoted the answer, so it wasn't helpful? What exactly do you need? — Johannes_B, Jul 16 '17 at 06:25

Skillmon · Answer 1 · 2017-07-24T15:40:02.877

1

You might use a tabular environment inside of the centred environment:

\documentclass[]{report}

\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
    \centering
    {\huge Title}\par
    \vspace{1cm} % change this to your liking!
    {\Large Doctoral}\par
    \vspace{1cm} % change this to your liking!
    \begin{tabular}[t]{@{}l@{}}
        2017\\
        Approved by:
    \end{tabular}
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}

But are you sure you want that? Together with a name, the spacing seems a bit odd imho:

edited Jul 24 '17 at 15:40

answered Jul 09 '17 at 17:26

Skillmon

60,462

But here, '2017' and 'Approved by' are not centered. – Sina Jul 09 '17 at 17:30
In case the title gets longer (two lines) you really should end it with a \par. And maybe get rid of the \\[space] spacing. – Johannes_B Jul 09 '17 at 17:30
@Sina Replace Approved by with Wombat dancing on the couch. – Johannes_B Jul 09 '17 at 17:31
@Sina they are. They get centered together so the whole tabular gets centred! – Skillmon Jul 09 '17 at 17:32
But I want 2017 be centered with 'Doctoral' as well. – Sina Jul 09 '17 at 17:35
@Sina and how should I know that when you write "So, I want all of them to be centered but only '2017' and 'Approved by' be left adjusted."? – Skillmon Jul 09 '17 at 17:36
I'm sorry but I added my original code to the question now. – Sina Jul 09 '17 at 17:41
@Sina I don't get what you want from your code to be honest. Do you want the 'approved by:' block with those lines to be moved to the right margin? – Skillmon Jul 09 '17 at 17:50
Bit sad to know the OP did not upvote your answers. :-( – Johannes_B Sep 10 '17 at 07:10
@Johannes_B it happens (sadly). But since the OP did not make clear, what he/she/it/Apache helicopter wants, I could not guess better, what was wanted. – Skillmon Sep 10 '17 at 11:43

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 24 '17 at 15:38

I have another idea of what you might want and how to achieve it. In my understanding, you want 2017 to be centred normally, but you want the next line to be left aligned to that centred 2017.

You could put the content in a \makebox which width you set to the line you want to be correctly centred (in this case 2017):

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
    \centering
    {\huge Title}\par
    \vspace{1cm} % change this to your liking!
    {\Large Doctoral}\par
    \vspace{1cm} % change this to your liking!
    2017\\%
    \setbox0\hbox{2017}% this sets a box with content 2017, you can access its width with \wd0
    \makebox[\wd0][l]{Approved by: Prof. C. Xavier}
\end{titlepage}
\end{document}

Left and center adjusted text in the first page of dissertation

2 Answers2