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I am wondering if there is a way to remove the space that comes between the title and the text when using the \paragraph command. I am working on my thesis, and have gotten it proof read by someone who is used to Word, and she says that this space looks odd, and not correct. I have only used LaTeX, so I am kind of used to it, but is there any way of changing it?

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    It is always good to provide a minimal example ;) Do you mean you have a doc where \paragraph{Some text.} follows \maketitle{The Title}? Also, it is generally not a good idea to take typographical tips from someone who uses Microsoft Word haha.
    – Jonathan Komar
    May 11, 2015 at 8:43

2 Answers 2

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After reading the discussion between you and David Carlisle, I realize now you'd like to adjust the paragraph heading (also called title—but I didn't expect that from a new user, sorry ;)

You can use the titlesec package for this.

Code

Adjust the .5em to your liking. I used em as the unit because it is a horizontal unit designed for text. You can even make it a negative value if you want to. titlespacing does require a unit, however.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\paragraph}{0pt}{0pt}{.5em}[]
\begin{document}
\paragraph{This} is an example.
\end{document}

Output

enter image description here

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  • Thanks :) I actually chose to re-structure the document and use subsubsections instead, but now I know how to do this as well :)
    – Julie Røsok
    May 12, 2015 at 13:16
  • @JulieRøsok If my answer or David's answer helped you, you should check one as the correct answer to get this question out of the "unanswered" list. If you would be so kind...
    – Jonathan Komar
    Jun 10, 2016 at 6:55
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In book paragraph is defined by

\newcommand\paragraph{\@startsection{paragraph}{4}{\z@}%
                                    {3.25ex \@plus1ex \@minus.2ex}%
                                    {-1em}%
                                    {\normalfont\normalsize\bfseries}}

the space after the heading is 1em specified by the 5th argument to \@startsection (negative so it is a run-in not a display heading).

so you can use \renewcommand to set that to any other negative value.

Note \paragraph is a section heading of level 4 as specified there, and should only be used in the sequence \chapter, \section, \subsection, \subsubsection, \paragraph.

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  • I see... I kind of knew that, but I have still used \paragraph in stead of \subsubsection, sometimes. Should I in these cases change to \subsubsection? I like that it allows me to use the title as the start of the sentence, but as mentioned, not sure about the space between the title and text. Hmm.. What would you suggest I do?
    – Julie Røsok
    May 11, 2015 at 12:04
  • @JulieRøsok The logically consistent and purist thing to do is use \subsubsection and if you want that to be inline redefine \subsubsection (essentially copying the definition of \paragraph above but change {paragraph}{4} to{subsubsection}{3} but sometimes you just want to get the document done and purity of markup isn't a concern so just using \paragraph "because it looks right" is not actually a mortal sin:-)
    – David Carlisle
    May 11, 2015 at 12:37

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