Center aligning chapters

Question

I'm using the following to center align chapters. Heres the code

 \newcommand{\cchapter}[1]{\chapter[#1]{\centering #1}}

And using \cchapter to format chapters. But the chapter heading for eg. "Chapter 1" is not getting center aligned. How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

I recommend to use the titlesec package. Here's an example:

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]
  {\normalfont\huge\bfseries\centering}
  {\chaptertitlename\ \thechapter}{20pt}{\Huge}

This is similar to the standard chapter plus \centering.

I prefer sans serif headings, because I think bold headings with serifs are too heavy. Hoewver, serifs are great for body text. Recently I used this:

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]
  {\normalfont\sffamily\Large\bfseries\centering}
  {\chaptertitlename\ \thechapter}{0pt}{\Huge}
\titleformat{\section}
  {\normalfont\sffamily\large\bfseries\centering}
  {\thesection}{1em}{}
\titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{30pt}{20pt}

To get:

Also because of the lighter appearance of those bold headings, KOMA-Script classes use sans-serif headings by default.