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From: news@afit.af.mil (News System Account)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: @startsection in book styles
Message-ID: <1991Mar01.190233.5731@afit.af.mil>
Date: 1 Mar 91 19:02:33 GMT
Organization: Air Force Institute of Technology
Lines: 27

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