Page Layout ⇒ Reformat Chapter Headings to minimize white Space

[seth_teller]

I wish to redefine chapter hedaings so that instead of rendering as it does now, i.e. as:

[page break]
[lots of whitespace]
Chapter \thechapter
[whitespace]
Foo
[lots of whitespace]

I would instead get

Chapter \thechapter{:} Foo % note no page or line break
[minimal whitespace]

I managed to do this by copying book.cls to mybook.cls and randomly hacking it, but still had to add white space manually after each \chapter call throughout the body of the document.

Can someone suggest an elegant way to accomplish this via a single \renewcommand or the like in my preamble? Thank you.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt]{mybook}

\begin{document}
\chapter{Foo}
\chapter{Bar}
\end{document}

[localghost]

Take a look at the titlesec package. Its manual has several examples which should be a good start. Other solutions can be found by a Forum Search.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[seth_teller]

Thanks much. OK, I tried titlesec (see MWE below) and it does what I want,
with two exceptions:
1) There is an unexplained blank page before the 2nd chapter.
How can I suppress it?
2) There is a lot of whitespace above each heading.
How can I suppress it?
Seth

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt]{book}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\def\chaptertitlename{Section}
\titleformat{\chapter}{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}{\chaptertitlename\ \thechapter{:\ }}{0pt}{\Large}{}
\titlespacing{\chapter}{0pt}{0pt}{10pt}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Foo}
%
This is chapter Foo.
\chapter{Bar}
%
This is chapter Bar.
\end{document}

[cgnieder]

You can use the \titlespacing{<cmd>}{<left>}{<above>}{<below>}[<right>] command to shift the title further up.

I can't see any unexplained blank space before the 2nd chapter.

I used the showframe package to visualize page dimensions:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt]{book}
\usepackage{showframe}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\def\chaptertitlename{Section}
\titleformat{\chapter}{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}{\chaptertitlename\ \thechapter{:\ }}{0pt}{\Large}{}
\titlespacing{\chapter}{0pt}{-20pt}{10pt}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Foo}
%
This is chapter Foo.
\chapter{Bar}
%
This is chapter Bar.
\end{document}

Regards

[seth_teller]

Thanks. The cause of the extra blank page was a \cleardoublepage in book style, I think.

Everything works now.

Best,

Seth