Title page customization

If you don’t pass in any customization, the default is the titlepage: plain with all elements that you specify, like titlepage-header but minimal styling.

Top level specifications

Here are the available top-level elements with examples:

    titlepage: plain
    titlepage-logo: "img/logo.png"
    titlepage-bg-image: "img/ringed-seal.png"
    titlepage-header: "The Publisher"
    titlepage-footer: | # text
      University Technical Series\
      Open Source Publication for All
      December 2025
    titlepage-geometry: ["top=3in", "bottom=1in", "right=1in", "left=1in"]

titlepage:

This is the overall theme. Default is true (which is the same as plain). false (or none) would stop the title page being generated at all. Note although titlepage specifies the overall theme, all features can be changed by passing a new value in titlepage-theme; see below.

  • none or false no title page
  • true (or plain): minimal styling. Everything on the page is left-aligned, with title, subtitle, author with affiliation superscripts, and affiliations in a numbered list. Header and footer appear if title-header and/or title-footer are specified.
  • vline: a 1pt wide vertical line on the left.
  • vline-text: a 0.5 inch wide blue vertical line with test.
  • academic: A title and subtitle with horizontal lines.
  • formal: Looks a bit like a thesis title page
  • classic-lined: different sized horizontal lines around title.
  • colorbox: title in a colored box
  • a file. You can pass in a static tex file for the title page. Include only the tex, no \begin{document} or similar.

titlepage-bg-image

The background image file. Default is to make this fill the whole page. See the bg-image theme for how to put this in the top-left corner and make smaller. You can tile the image too.

titlepage-header

Some text for the header. Note “header” doesn’t mean it has to be at the top. You can order your elements however you want using the elements in titlepage-theme.

titlepage-geometry

This sets the margins for the text area. If you have a background image in a top corner for example, you need to pass this in to shift the text area down so it doesn’t overlap your image.

titlepage-geometry: ["top=3in", "bottom=1in", "right=1in", "left=1in"]

Title page element customization

The title page has the following elements: page, title, subtitle, author, header, footer, logo, vline, bg-image. Each of these can be customized via titlepage-theme.

Example:

    titlepage-theme: 
      page-html-color: "c4c4c4" 
      title-style: "plain"
      title-fontfamily: "Arial"
      title-fontstyle: ["Huge", "bfseries"]
      title-align: left
      title-space-after: 1in

elements

What elements do you want to appear and in what order? You can also add text to add between the elements. The element names are \\titleblock, \\authorblock, \\affiliationblock, \\headerblock, \\footerblock, \\dateblock, \\logoblock.

An example specification would be

    titlepage-theme: 
      elements: ["\\logoblock", "\\authorblock", "\\vfill", "\\titleblock", "Some text at the bottom"]

This puts the logo at the top, followed by the author block, then some stretchable space followed by the title and some text. Basically in the tex file this will appear like

\logoblock
\vspace{logo-space-after}
\authorblock
\vspace{author-space-after}
\vfill
\titleblock
\vspace{title-space-after}
Some text at the bottom

Knowing this, you can see how you might include things like horizontal lines and any text with TeX formatting in your title page. The alignment of Some text at the bottom will be governed by page-align in this case.

page-html-color

The page color as an html color; leave off the leading #.

-style

For title, header, footer, date, these can be

  • plain no lines or boxes around element
  • doubleline a line on the top and bottom
  • colorbox element in a a color filled box
  • none the element won’t be shown at all

For author-style, these can be

  • plain authors listed with author-sep as separation.
  • plain-with-and same as plain but the last two authors will be separated with and
  • superscript like plain but superscripts for affiliations
  • superscript-with-and like plain-with-and but superscripts for affiliations
  • author-address each author on a separate line with address(es)

Note author-sep: "newline" will give each author on a new line. If you want to specify the character separating authors in a list, keep in mind that Pandoc strips all preceeding and following whitespace. So to specify " -- " as the separation you need to use "\ --\ ".

For affiliation-style, these can be

  • numbered-list each affiliation gets a number on a new line
  • numbered-list-with-correspondence add a line for the corresponding author.

-color

Available for page, title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date.

Do not use both page-html-color and page-color. Choose one. page-color will use names. What names are available? Google latex xcolor. Standard color names.

The xcolor LaTeX package is used so you can define any color you want with a xcolor command. Then you can refer to this color where you want to specify a color. You define the color in your LaTeX header. For example, define the color mygreen by including this in your format yaml and then you can use mygreen as a color name.

    include-in-header:
      text: |
        \definecolor{mygreen}{HTML}{808000}

-fontfamily

Available for page, title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date.

The fontfamily can be specified for the page and will be used for all the elements unless you pass in an element specific font family, like title-fontfamily. The font family can be a name that you have in your font library or it can be a font file. You can download lots of different font files. The is the most surefire way to get your fonts to work.

The extension has an example font file: QTDublinIrish.otf and the extension has the Qualitype fonts. To use these, specify your font as _extensions/nmfs-opensci/titlepage/fonts/qualitype/opentype/<font-file-name>. To use other font files, you can download a font file from the LaTeX Font Catalogue. The otf (opentype) and ttf files should work. Some fonts will have font styling like “bold” so you will need to use the font file with the styling you want. Or you probably can download the folder with regular, italic etc files and pass in the font directory name. Note not all fonts have all styling. For example, small caps (textsc) is only available for some fonts.

I have fonts on my machine but Quarto can’t find them! Good luck. Stackoverflow will hopefully help you. Fonts that cannot be found is a source of much TeX misery. Using font files that you specify directly avoids this problem. You should also be aware that LaTeX uses packages to change the fonts, which will be surprising if you don’t come from a LaTeX background. See the chapter on fonts.

-fontstyle

Available for title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date.

This is a list of styles to add. ["tiny", "textit"] would be tiny size italic text. It needs to be styles that LaTeX knows; don’t add \ to the name. Sizes: tiny, small, normal, large, Large, LARGE, huge, Huge. Styles: “textsc”, “textit”, “textbf”, “uppercase”, “lowercase”, “bfseries”. Are common ones.

-fontsize

Available for page, title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date. Note, this will be ignored if you pass in a font size (like "large") in -fontfamily.

The font size in points. Leave off “pt”; just specify this as a number, like title-fontsize: 20.

-spacing

Available for page, title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date.

The spacing between lines if text runs into multiple lines. Specify in points. Leave off “pt”; just specify this as a number like title-spacing: 24. If you only specify fontsize, it will use 1.2 fontsize as the spacing.

-align

Available for page, title, subtitle, author, affiliation, header, footer, date, logo.

The page alignment: left, right or center. For title, subtitle, author, header, and footer, you can also specify spread and it will spread the text across the whole page.

-space-after

Available for title, author, affiliation, header, footer, date, logo.

How much space to add after the element. Can be in, cm, mm, pt or percent of paper or text, e.g. 0.5\\textheight. Note, in elements, you can have a \\vfill somewhere if you want the text spread fully from top to bottom. Like so

titlepage-theme:
  elements: ["\\titleblock", "\\vfill", "\\logoblock"]

Note that you need title-space-after to not be set to 0 for \vfill to work here. It’s a quirk of LaTeX that for \vfill to work, you have to have a \vspace{} line and title-space-after will be translated to \vspace{title-space-after} in the TeX file. By default, all the elements have a non-zero space-after, so you shouldn’t run into trouble unless you were to set title-space-after: 0 here.

title-subtitle-space-between

Space to add between the title and subtitle.

-colorbox-...

Available for title, author, header, footer, date.

If -style is colorbox, you can specify the colorbox features:

  • -colorbox-fill fill color
  • -colorbox-borderwidth width of the border (in, cm, mm, pt)
  • -colorbox-bordercolor border color

The xcolor LaTeX package is used so you can define any color you want in your LaTeX header. For example, define the color mygreen include this in your format yaml. Then you can use mygreen as a color name.

    include-in-header:
      text: |
        \definecolor{mygreen}{HTML}{808000}

bg-image-size

The background image size. Specify this with units like in, cm, mm, pt or as a fraction of the paper or text like 0.5\\paperwidth.

bg-image-location

Where to pin the image. Can be

  • URCorner upper right corner
  • ULCorner upper left corner`
  • LRCorner lower right corner
  • LLCorner lower left corner
  • TileSquare tile the image

bg-image-fading

Add a fade to the image. Can be

  • top, north top of image
  • left, west left side of image
  • right, east right side of image
  • bottom, south bottom of image
  • fadeout fade out in a circle starting from center

vrule-...

The vertical rule specifications are

  • vrule-width the width as in, cm, mm, pt (e.g. “1cm”) or a fraction of the paper or text like "0.1\\textwidth".
  • vrule-color names of colors. It’s the xcolors and you can define colors.
  • vrule-align left, right, leftright. The latter makes a rule on both sides.
  • vrule-space-after the gap between the vertical rule and the text
  • vrule-text text to put in the vertical rule
  • vrule-text-color color of the text
  • vrule-text-style text styles. See above on what styles are possible.

The xcolor LaTeX package is used so you can define any color you want in your LaTeX header. For example, define the color mygreen include this in your format yaml. Then you can use mygreen as a color name.

    include-in-header:
      text: |
        \definecolor{mygreen}{HTML}{808000}

All possible titlepage-theme values

These are features that you can customize. If you leave it out, it will either not set the value (so use whatever defaults LaTeX has) or will choose a theme specific default. See the themes.

    titlepage-theme: 
      elements: ["\\titleblock", "Some text", "\\authorblock"]
      page-html-color: "c4c4c4"
      page-color: green # use either html-color or color
      page-text-align: center
      page-fontfamily: "Arial"
      page-fontsize: 40
      page-spacing: 48
      title-style: "plain"
      title-color: "white"
      title-fontfamily: "Arial"
      title-fontsize: 14
      title-spacing: 16
      title-fontstyle: ["textit", "bfseries"]
      title-align: spread
      title-space-after: 1in
      title-colorbox-fill: "cyan"
      title-colorbox-borderwidth: 2pt
      title-colorbox-bordercolor: "black"
      title-subtitle-space-between: "0.1\\textheight"
      subtitle-color: "white" 
      subtitle-fontfamily: "Arial"
      subtitle-fontsize: 10
      subtitle-spacing: 12
      subtitle-fontstyle: ["textit", "bfseries"] 
      subtitle-align: center
      subtitle-space-after: "1cm" 
      author-style: "superscript"
      author-sep: ",\ "
      author-color: "white" 
      author-fontfamily: "Arial"
      author-fontsize: 14
      author-spacing: 16
      author-fontstyle: ["textsc"]
      author-align: center
      author-space-after: "0.1\\paperheight" 
      affiliation-style: "numberedlist"
      affiliation-fontfamily: "Arial"
      affiliation-fontsize: 12
      affiliation-spacing: 16
      affiliation-fontstyle: "large"
      affiliation-align: left
      affiliation-space-after: 1in
      footer-style: "colorbox"
      footer-fontfamily: "Arial"
      footer-fontsize: 12
      footer-spacing: 16
      footer-fontstyle: "uppercase"
      footer-align: left
      footer-space-after: 1in
      footer-colorbox-fill: "cyan"
      footer-colorbox-borderwidth: 2pt
      footer-colorbox-bordercolor: "black"
      header-style: "plain"
      header-fontfamily: "Arial"
      header-fontsize: 12
      header-spacing: 20
      header-fontstyle: "lowercase"
      header-align: left
      header-space-after: 1in
      header-colorbox-fill: "cyan"
      header-colorbox-borderwidth: 2pt
      header-colorbox-bordercolor: "black"
      date-style: "colorbox"
      date-fontfamily: "Arial"
      date-fontsize: 12
      date-spacing: 20
      date-fontstyle: ["slseries"]
      date-align: left
      date-space-after: 1in
      date-colorbox-fill: "cyan"
      date-colorbox-borderwidth: 2pt
      date-colorbox-bordercolor: "black"
      logo-align: center
      logo-size: 0.25
      logo-space-after: 1in
      bg-image-size: 0.25
      bg-image-location: "URCorner"
      bg-image-fading: "top"
      bg-image-opacity: 0.5
      vrule-width: 20pt
      vrule-color: "blue"
      vrule-align: left
      vrule-space-after: 10pt
      vrule-text: "Some text for inside vrule"
      vrule-text-color: "white"
      vrule-text-style: {"Huge", "textit"}