# Formatting section titles

Forgive the stupid simplicity of this question, and please feel free to refer me to an older answer. I'm not quite familiar enough with LaTeX terminology to have found it.

All I want to do is set a different default format for my section titles. Instead of just being bolded and slightly larger than the main text, I'd like them to be of normal weight, the same size as the main text, and all caps.

I'm using the article class.

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do any of your section titles contain math? if so, then small caps isn't a good choice, since much of the math may then be taller than the text. (this is why the ams document classes use all real uppercase for running heads, even though it would be more traditional, and proper, to use small caps; the inter-letter spacing in small caps is better, and if designed properly, the shapes are also subtly different from regular caps. but in some situations, math rules.) –  barbara beeton Nov 30 '11 at 14:07

You can use the titlesec package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\titleformat{\section}
{\normalfont\scshape}{\thesection}{1em}{}

\begin{document}

\section{Test Section}
\lipsum[1]

\end{document}


to use small caps for the section titles:

or

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\titleformat{\section}
{\normalfont}{\thesection}{1em}{\MakeUppercase{#1}}

\begin{document}

\section{Test Section}
\lipsum[1]

\end{document}


to use upper case for the section titles:

If you don't want to use the titlesec package, you can redefine the \section command, as implemented in article.cls; here's an example of such a redefinition to obtain section titles using small caps:

\documentclass{article}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\section{\@startsection {section}{1}{\z@}%
{-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
{2.3ex \@plus.2ex}%
{\normalfont\scshape}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\section{Test Section}

\end{document}

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Thank you, that works perfectly! –  Brian Hamilton Nov 30 '11 at 4:18
That is a perfect explanation but I am curious about what do the commands inside the fourth, fifth and sixth braces do exactly. I referred to the manual but got confused more. –  Vesnog Mar 24 at 0:29