What do I tell titlesec to get default values?

Question

I'm making a style package for my student union, changing to our official fonts and adding other convenience methods. I've declared a main (serif) font and a title (sans) font family, and I want to use titlesec to make the title and section headers use \titlefont, but in order to change only the font I need to know what the defaults are. That is, what would the titlesec commands to produce the original look and feel be?

I use XeLaTeX.

Answer 1

You don't need to reset everything to do this if all you want is to use your sans serif font as the titling font. You can just set your sans font with fontspec and then pass the [sf] option to titlesec. If you also want to change the title formatting you will need to load the titling package, which provides simple hooks for doing so.

If you do want to set the font separately using titlesec, §9.2 of the titlesec documentation gives the exact format for the standard classes.

In the following example I've combined both methods to show the possibilities. I've chosen a silly font for the title just for illustrative purposes.

% !TEX TS-program = XeLaTeX
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
\setsansfont{Linux Biolinum O}
\newfontfamily\mytitlefont{TeX Gyre Chorus}
\usepackage{titling}
\renewcommand\maketitlehooka{\mytitlefont}
\usepackage[sf]{titlesec}
\titleformat*{\section}{\Large\mytitlefont}
\title{A title}
\author{An author}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{A section}
Some text.
\subsection{A subsection}
\end{document}