Question

I am writing a personal statement in latex. I don’t want the big margin at the top of the page not big title taking a lot of space. I just like to make the layout compact but still clearly spaced with title, name and other necessary information, since there may be restriction on the number of pages. One example would be http://www.hsc.unt.edu/education/CIM/Documents/PS-Sample2_000.pdf. I wonder where to find some good latex templates or examples?

Thanks and regards!

Answer 1

I would use the geometry package to establish the desired margins. To get the margins in your sample document, try:

\usepackage[left=1in,right=1in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}

Your next requirement was to fix the title block. LaTeX uses the internal command \@maketitle to format the title block. You can redefine this as you like. To achieve the same title block style as in the sample document, use:

\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}% provides colors for text
\makeatletter% since there's an at-sign (@) in the command name
\renewcommand{\@maketitle}{%
  \begin{center}
    \parskip\baselineskip% skip a line between paragraphs in the title block
    \parindent=0pt% don't indent paragraphs in the title block
    \textcolor{red}{\bf\@title}\par
    \textbf{\@author}\par
    %\@date% remove the percent sign at the beginning of this line if you want the date printed
  \end{center}
}
\makeatother% resets the meaning of the at-sign (@)

The \@title, \@author, and \@date commands will print the title, author, and date. You can use whatever formatting commands you like to set the text in bold, different colors, etc.

Put all of the above commands in the preamble of the document. The preamble is the space between \documentclass and \begin{document}.

\documentclass{article}

% this is the preamble
% put all of the above code in here

\title{Personal Statement}
\author{Tim}

\begin{document}

\maketitle% prints the title block

Emergency medicine has always been a passion of mine\ldots

\end{document}