### The style of section headings

Suppose that the editor of your favourite journal has specified that section headings must be centred, in small capitals, and subsection headings ragged right in italic, but that you don't want to get involved in the sort of programming described in The LaTeX Companion (see TeX-related books; the programming itself is discussed elsewhere in this FAQ). The following hack will probably satisfy your editor. Define yourself new commands

      \newcommand{\ssection}[1]{%
         \section[#1]{\centering\sc #1}}
      \newcommand{\ssubsection}[1]{%
         \subsection[#1]{\raggedright\it #1}}

and then use `\ssection` and `\ssubsection` in place of `\section` and `\subsection`. This isn't perfect: section numbers remain in bold, and starred forms need a separate redefinition. (Also, in the unlikely event that you still are using the prototype NFSS with LaTeX 2.09, the trick won't work because font-changing commands behave differently there.)

The package sectsty provides an easy-to-use set of tools to do this job, while the package titlesec has a structured approach based on redefinition of the sectioning and chapter commands themselves. Titlesec's approach allows it to offer far more radical adjustment: its options provide (in effect) a toolbox for designing your own sectioning commands' output.

The fncychap package provides a nice collection of customised chapter heading designs. The anonchap package provides a simple means of typesetting chapter headings "like section headings" (i.e., without the "Chapter" part of the heading); the tocbibind package provides the same commands, in pursuit of another end. Unfortunately, fncychap is not attuned to the existence of front- and backmatter in book class documents.

The documentation of fncychap is distributed as a separate PostScript file.

`anonchap.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/misc/anonchap.sty
`fncychap.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/fncychap (zip, browse)
`sectsty.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/sectsty (zip, browse)
`titlesec.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/titlesec (zip, browse)
`tocbibind.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/tocbibind (zip, browse)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=secthead