On 6/24/10 10:37 PM, Mike Martell wrote:
Do I place this at the top of the document? The spacing in the
document doesn't change. I tried at the top and in one of the
sections whose spacing was inconsistent.
It has to go in the LaTeX preamble. You also have to wrap it in
"\makeatletter" at the beginning and "\makeatother" at the end.
The specific command I suggested won't do what you want. You'll have to
adjust the spacing and the font commands that format the heading. But
you should actually be able to get those values from the class file.
That is, if you have using thesis.cls, then in that file somewhere you
will find something like:
\newcommand\sectio...@startsection {section}{1}...@}%
{-3.5ex \...@plus -1ex \...@minus -.2ex}%
{2.3ex \...@plus.2ex}%
{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}
(This is taken from article.cls.) The six arguments to \...@startsection
(i) set the name of the division (section)
(ii) set the "level" in the hierarchy of divisions (so chapter is 0)
(iii) set the indent for headings (zero, in this case, using the
macro \z@)
(iv) set the space above the heading
(v) set the space below the heading
(vi) declare any commands that should be used to set the heading;
in this case, it is large and bold
As for (iv) and (v), these are what LaTeX calls "rubber lengths" and the
second means: Add 2.3 exes of space, and optionally add up to 0.2 exes,
if necessary to fix page breaks, etc. The former means: Add 3.5 exes of
space, optionally adding up to 1 ex and optionally subtracting up to
0.2exes; the minus is a hack that means: suppress the indentation of the
first paragraph following this heading. So that is why the spacing can
be inconsistent: LaTeX is being told it can alter the spacing before a
section heading by almost a third.
What I did was just copy and paste this command, making it a
\renewcommnd, and then remove the rubber bits. You can do the same.
Btw, if this doesn't solve the problem, then the issue probably has to
do with float placement. But we can come back to that.
Richard
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Richard Heck <rgh...@comcast.net
<mailto:rgh...@comcast.net>> wrote:
On 06/24/2010 09:22 PM, Mike Martell wrote:
Hi:
I'm trying to finish formatting my dissertation to submit to
the library. I'm using a thesis class. My output has the
spacing between text and sections, and text and subjections,
to vary throughout the dissertation. I need the spacing to be
consistent. After searching the list archive and some
tutorials, I tried inserting \raggedbottom to the top of my
diss, but this does not fix the problem.
Is there a way to fix this?
This is normal. LaTeX varies the spacing as the needs of page
breaking require, just as is done in books and articles. If you
need it to be constant, then do something along the lines of:
\renewcommand\sectio...@startsection{section}{1}{\z@}%
{-3.5ex}{2ex}%
{\normlfont\Large\bfseries}%
The semantics of the \...@startsection command are explained here:
http://help-csli.stanford.edu/tex/latex-sections.shtml
and elsewhere.
rh
