Get rid of page number on 1st page of ToC in LaTeX!

LaTeX, or more generally TeX, is undoubtly the best typesetting tool available, and what’s more, it’s for free (for Windows users – check out MiKTeX!). Yet, there are few things that should work in a certain “obvious” way, yet they don’t (fortunately, there’s very few of them).

One of them is quite a surprising thing – pagestyle{empty} command does not affect first page of the table of contents. Yet, all the other pages of ToC it does! The same holds for list of figures and list of tables.
This is quite an annoyance, especially if you put ToC at the beginning of the document, and want to have all the pages, before the real contents starts, without the page numbering.

So, how to get rid of the page number on the first page of table of contents in LaTeX? You have to dig into the header and footer setting for this.

First thing is to use fancyhdr package – put usepackage{fancyhdr} command anywhere before the begin{document}.

Second, right before issuing the tableofcontents command, redefine the “plain page style” to an empty one, like this:

fancypagestyle{plain}
{
    fancyhead{}
    fancyfoot{}
}	% clear header and footer of plain page because of ToC

And after the ToC, just get back to the “classical” plain page style (this is important – even if you use your “fancy” page style, each page containing first page of chapter is “plain”, unless you redefine this behaviour), like this:

fancypagestyle{plain}
{
    fancyhead{}
    fancyfoot[C]{thepage}
}	% re-define plain page after the ToC

This block has to be “on a new page” – either after you issue newpage or cleardoublepage command, or after your first chapter{...} command.