Underline and center headings

Question

For a paper I have to make my LaTeX document guideline conforming. Many of you will already guess now that this means dirty work by violating virtually all possible typography standards.

My biggest problem is concerning section headings. They have to be:

• Capitalized
• Underlined
• Centered
• Have roman numerals
• The bibliography should not be appended a section number.

I tried to achieve this using the sectsty package and since that did not work out gave the titlesec package a shot, both with and without the ulem package.
However, no combination worked. The problem occurs in any way when you give the option underlined.

Here is a minimal example with the sectsty package:

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

%% ADJUSTMENTS FOR IAC
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%% Get stupid underlining for headings right
\usepackage[]{ulem}

%% Change heading style
\usepackage{sectsty}
    \sectionfont{\MakeUppercase\rmfamily\center\underline}

\begin{document}
    \section{Test Section}
\end{document}

How can I make those headings conform to the rules? Would it probably even be the easiest way to manually write the headings, without a command at all?

Answer 1

Building on Gonzalo's answer: Use the numberless key to define the starred version of \section.

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\titleformat{\section}
  {\normalfont\Large\sffamily\bfseries\filcenter}{}{0em}{\uline{\thesection\hspace*{ 1em}\MakeUppercase{#1}}}
\titleformat{name=\section,numberless}
  {\normalfont\Large\sffamily\bfseries\filcenter}{}{0em}{\uline{\MakeUppercase{#1}}}

\renewcommand*{\thesection}{\Roman{section}}

\begin{document}

\section{Test Section}

\lipsum[1]

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\bibitem{A01} A. Author. \emph{Alpha}. 2001.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

Answer 2

Here's a simple solution using the ulem package and the explicit option for titlesec:

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\titleformat{\section}
  {\normalfont\Large\sffamily\bfseries\filcenter}{\uline{\thesection\hspace*{ 1em}}}{0em}{\uline{\MakeUppercase{#1}}}

\renewcommand*{\thesection}{\Roman{section}}

\begin{document}
\section{Test Section}

\lipsum[1]

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\bibitem{A01} A. Author. \emph{Alpha}. 2001.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

Answer 3

For several years usage of titlesec with KOMA-Script classes is not recommended or only recommended if you do not need extended headings features of the KOMA-Script classes. So I would recommend to use scrartcl's interface to change the section heading:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[]{ulem}
\usepackage{microtype}% to add letter spacing

\addtokomafont{section}{\rmfamily\lsstyle}% use roman instead of sans serif
                                % but letter spaceing
\renewcommand*{\sectionlinesformat}[4]{%
  \ifstr{#1}{section}{% do it only, for section level
    \centering \uline{#3\MakeUppercase{#4}}%
  }{%
    \@hangfrom{\hskip #2#3}{#4}% otherwise use the default
  }%
}

\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\section{Test Section}
\blindtext
\section*{Test Section}
\blindtext
\addsec{Test Section}
\blindtext
\end{document}

Here I've used \addtokomafont to change the font of the heading and also to add some automatic letter spacing (because of the upper case typesetting) and redefined \sectionlinesformat to add \MakeUppercase, \uline and \centering. If not only the section but also sub-section etc. titles should be centered. You could get centering also using \let\raggedsection\centering. Nevertheless, \sectionlinesformat should be used for \MakeUppercase and \uline in that case too.

Answer 4

Because both the answer provided by Gonzalo and the answer provided by lockstep don't work well, here is mine. This might be grave diggin' because the original question is 5 years old but it shows up at the top of google. The problem with both of their solutions is, that the entire caption is in one hbox. Because of that long captions do not work. They get an overfull hbox. My solution only addresses that and doesn't address the rest of the question (capitalized captions and stuff). In addition my solution does not work with KOMA-script-classes.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{sectsty}

\allsectionsfont{\sffamily\underline}
\titleformat{\section}
{\normalsize\bfseries\raggedright}
   {\llap{\makebox[3mm][l]{\thesection}}}
   {0em}
   {}

\begin{document}
\section{This is a really long section heading and I'm proud of it}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

EDIT: For a KOMA compatible way to allow line breakable underlined headings see this answer.

EDIT2: If you use KOMA and hyperref, the above provided link doesn't work if you use \tableofcontents or similar, so you might take a look at this other answer.

Answer 5

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document} 
\thispagestyle{empty} 
\font\uc="Times New Roman" at 12pt
\begin{center}
\underbar{\uc{But it may be enough to get you started, at least. }}
\end{center}
\lipsum[1]

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\bibitem{A01} A. Author. \emph{Alpha}. 2011.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}