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From: ogawa@orion.arc.nasa.gov (Arthur Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: @startsection in book styles
Message-ID: <1991Mar2.055016.28439@news.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 2 Mar 91 05:50:16 GMT
References: <1991Mar01.190233.5731@afit.af.mil>
Sender: usenet@news.arc.nasa.gov (USENET Administration)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Lines: 44

In article <1991Mar01.190233.5731@afit.af.mil> news@afit.af.mil (News System Account) writes:
|The @startsection macro in latex.tex has a BEFORESKIP parameter which does 2
|things.  1. Its absolute value gives the amount of space to leave before
|the section header, and 2. If is negative the following text has its paragraph
|indent suppressed.
|
|I wanted to not suppress this indent mentioned in item 2 so I made my own
|.sty file with a revised version of \section and \subsection (from bk10.sty)
|as follows:
|
|\def\section{\@startsection {section}{1}{\z@}{3.5ex plus -1ex minus
| -.2ex}{2.3ex plus .2ex}{\Large\bf}}
| \def\subsection{\@startsection{subsection}{2}{\z@}{3.25ex plus -1ex minus
|  -.2ex}{1.5ex plus .2ex}{\large\bf}}
|
|The only difference from bk10.sty is the 4th parameter of \@startsection
|which used to be negative.
|
|This change caused major problems in my document where the sections started.
|The section header appeared further down overlapped with the text, and text
|later on the page was also overlapped.
|
|Using \renewcommand made no difference.
|
|Can anybody help?
|
|Mark Roth
|mroth@afit.af.mil

Bravo to Mark for deciding to delve into and change a .sty file! I hope that
others will amke the plunge--it just isn't all that hard.

Mark, your problem is obvious: you needed to change the glue specification:

-3.5ex plus -1ex minus -.2ex

to:

3.5ex plus 1ex minus .2ex

In your code, you've changed only the sign of the glue's natural length.

Keep at it,
Art Ogawa