Chapter formatting

Question

I use report document class and the thing is that I would like to remove Chapter x phrase, add chapter number before chapter title and remove blank place between chapter name and top of page. For example normally it is like:

top of page
blank place
blank place
Chapter 1
Title of chapter
content

It would be better to be like this:

top of page
1. Title of chapter
content

Answer 1

You can use the titlesec package; a little example:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{titlesec}

\titleformat{\chapter}[block]
  {\normalfont\huge\bfseries}{\thechapter.}{1em}{\Huge}
\titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{-19pt}{0pt}

\begin{document}

\chapter{Test chapter}

\end{document}

Answer 2

The macro that generates the heading of the chapter (and what it looks like eventually) in the default book and report document classes is \@makechapterhead (I've added some comments/descriptors):

\def\@makechapterhead#1{%
  \vspace*{50\p@}% <----------------- Space from top of page to Chapter #
  {\parindent \z@ \raggedright \normalfont
    \ifnum \c@secnumdepth >\m@ne
        \huge\bfseries \@chapapp\space \thechapter% <-- Chapter #
        \par\nobreak
        \vskip 20\p@% <-------------- Space between Chapter # and title
    \fi
    \interlinepenalty\@M
    \Huge \bfseries #1\par\nobreak% <------------------ Chapter title
    \vskip 40\p@% <------------------ Space between chapter title and first paragraph
  }}

You can update these to your liking to modify the display. For example:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\makeatletter
\def\@makechapterhead#1{%
  {\parindent \z@ \raggedright \normalfont
    \ifnum \c@secnumdepth >\m@ne
        \huge\bfseries \thechapter.\ % <-- Chapter # (without "Chapter")
    \fi
    \interlinepenalty\@M
    #1\par\nobreak% <------------------ Chapter title
    \vskip 40\p@% <------------------ Space between chapter title and first paragraph
  }}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\chapter{A chapter}\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

In the above example, the text block boundary was emphasized using showframe.