RMarkdown. How to reduce space between title block and start of body text

Question

I've been using RMarkdown via RStudio on a Mac successfully.

Recently upgraded to RStudio 1.2.5019 and tinytex_0.18 and now the vertical spaceing between my "title block" and "first body text / heading" has increased.

Simple example, (deliberately excluding author: and date:), is:

---
output: 
  pdf_document
title: "Example of Title to Body Text"
subtitle: Subtitle Places Here
---
This is the first paragraph (or heading if specified as such). It is quite a way down from the title of the document. How can this be reduced to a "single line" vertical space?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt.

I then tried to use the "titlesec" package, but haven't been able to work out which command to use to achieve the desired outcome. Example of attempt is:

---
output: 
  pdf_document

subparagraph: yes
header-includes: |
  \usepackage{titlesec}
  \titlespacing{\title}{0pt}{\parskip}{-\parskip}

title: "Example of Title to Body Text"
subtitle: Subtitle Places Here
---
This is the first paragraph (or heading if specified as such). It is quite a way down from the title of the document. How can this be reduced to a "single line" vertical space?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt.

This is what it currently looks like rendered to PDF.

This is what I would like the PDF to look more like (edit from graphics program).

So, how can I reduce this vertical spacing between the title block and the start of the document's body?

Thanks in advance.

Meagre

Answer 1

You can reduce the space between the (sub)title and the first paragraph by adding \vspace{} command from LaTeX right before the first paragraph.

---
output: 
  pdf_document

subparagraph: yes
header-includes: |
  \usepackage{titlesec}
  \titlespacing{\title}{0pt}{\parskip}{-\parskip}

title: "Example of Title to Body Text"
subtitle: Subtitle Places Here
---

\vspace{-5truemm}


This is the first paragraph (or heading if specified as such). It is quite a way down from the title of the document. How can this be reduced to a "single line" vertical space?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt.

Vassalize

Just wanted to say thanks! This has worked just as I needed. – Meagre

Happy to hear your success! Well,don't forget to upvote, too, hahaha – Vassalize

Answer 2

For others who are also trying to move both the title and body text upward:

I do not understand what the two lines that paulr shared are doing:

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\title}{0pt}{\parskip}{-\parskip}

But I found another solution here, which uses the package of titling, and then moves the title up by \setlengh{\droptitle}{5em}.

After title is done, you can move the body text up using carlos's answer.

Phthisis

@Meagre tried to reduce the space between title of an article and the contents by applying titlesec package. However, the command \titlespacing{\title}{0pt}{\parskip}{-\parskip} is in vain because the package does not support the spacing handling of the title of the article. The package only deals with the spacing around the \section, \subsection... and so on. – Vassalize

In case confusing to anyone why they are getting "undefined control sequence" error, there is a slight typo, should be: \setlength{\droptitle}{5em} . It's subtle enough to miss upon reading :) Also, if you want to move the title up, rather than down on the page, make this value negative, i.e. \usepackage{titling} \setlength{\droptitle}{-5em} . This solution works nicely for this usecase, thanks @Hongtao Hao – Dominican