Sectioning

Sectioning commands provide the means to structure your text into units. The document style determines which sectioning commands are supported. They should be used with the following heirarchy:

The counter for each level is reset when the level above is incremented (except chapters are numbered sequentially regardless of the part).

All sectioning commands take the same general form:

  \chapter[optional]{title}
  \label{lab}  % optional, for cross referencing
   text for this unit ...
   ...
A blank line before or after a sectioning command has no effect.

In addition to providing the heading in the text, the mandatory argument of the sectioning command can appear in two other places:

  1. the table of contents
  2. the running head at the top of the page
You may not want the same thing to appear in these other two places as appears in the text heading. To handle this situation, the sectioning commands have an optional argument that provides the text for these other two purposes.

The sectioning commands have *-forms that print a title, but do not include a number and do not make an entry in the table of contents. For example, the *-form of the \subsection command could look like:

\subsection*{Example subsection}


Related topics
Back to LaTeX Table of Contents
Revised by Sheldon Green, agxsg@giss.nasa.gov, 30 May 1995.