Adjusting Single Appendix title

Question

I'm writing my thesis in report document class with several packages including

     \usepackage[nottoc,notlot,notlof]{tocbibind}
     \usepackage[title,titletoc]{appendix}

To create the only appendix in my document I type

     \begin{appendices}
     \chapter{}
     \section{Some title here}
     Some text here!
     \end{appendices}

This works fine and produces "Appendix A" in the table of contents. However, since it is the only appendix, I'd rather not have an "A" in front of "Appendix". To suppress this I used

     \setcounter{chapter}{-1} 

which does the job, but makes the numbering of sections (and subsections) in the appendix "ugly" with ".1", ".1.1", etc. Does anyone know a better way of doing this?

PS I've read the answers to the two questions on Appendices here http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/faq/author-faq but still am not able to fix the issue.

Answer 1

You can provide local redefinitions for \thechapter, \thesection, \thesubsection, \thefigure and \thetable:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[nottoc,notlot,notlof]{tocbibind}
\usepackage[title,titletoc]{appendix}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

\begin{appendices}
\renewcommand\thechapter{}
\renewcommand\thesection{\arabic{section}}
\renewcommand\thesubsection{\thesection.\arabic{subsection}}
\renewcommand\thefigure{\arabic{figure}}
\renewcommand\thetable{\arabic{table}}
\chapter{}
\section{A test section}
Some text here
\subsection{A test subsection}
Some text here
\end{appendices}

\end{document}

An image of the resulting ToC:

An image of the Appendix in the document body:

Notice that this can produce ambiguity, since you will have two different objects with the same numbering (the first chapter of the document and the first section in the appendix are both numbered "1", for example). To avoid this, you could number the sections alphabetically or using Roman numerals:

\renewcommand\thechapter{}
\renewcommand\thesection{\Alph{section}}
\renewcommand\thesubsection{\thesection.\arabic{subsection}}
\renewcommand\thefigure{\arabic{figure}}
\renewcommand\thetable{\arabic{table}}

or

\renewcommand\thechapter{}
\renewcommand\thesection{\Roman{section}}
\renewcommand\thesubsection{\thesection.\arabic{subsection}}
\renewcommand\thefigure{\arabic{figure}}
\renewcommand\thetable{\arabic{table}}