## LaTeX forum ⇒ Text Formatting ⇒ Starting the section numbering with 0

Information and discussion about LaTeX's general text formatting features (e.g. bold, italic, enumerations, ...)
jonnyneill14
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:41 pm

### Starting the section numbering with 0

ive written my essay and put it into sections and all that. i have a first section of preliminary definitions that i would like to call section 0, but my section numbering starts at 1. any idea how i can do this?
thanks

localghost
Site Moderator
Posts: 9206
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:06 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
I see two possible solutions. You can either set the section counter to make your section start from Zero.
`\setcounter{section}{-1}`

Add this line right before the section that contains your preliminaries. On the other hand you could put your preliminaries into an unnumbered section.
`\section*{Preliminaries}\addcontenstline{toc}{section}{Preliminaries}`

This would cause the following sections to be numbered from One and place an entry in the ToC.

This solution is for the standrard classes. Other classes like those from KOMA Script or memoir have built-in features.

Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹
LaTeX Community Moderator

¹ System: openSUSE 42.2 (Linux 4.4.52), TeX Live 2016 (vanilla), TeXworks 0.6.1