Making the whole document 12pt and non-bold including titles, toc, references etc

Question

I am writing a thesis in social sciences and they don't have a template for the thesis (they use MS word). So, I am creating my own.

The whole thesis should be 12pt and there shouldn't be any bold characters. (italics are possible) So, I was wondering if there is a way to define everything that way, including chapters, table of contents, references, section names, title page, captions etc.

Thanks for your help.

Edit: I am using \documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{report}. If there is a better option, I can change it to another class. I didn't know margins are important, and I haven't actually dealt with them yet. But I guess 2cm margins will be fine.

I haven't decided what packages to load, but apacite, setspace, float, graphicx and times packages will most likely be used.

I was thinking, instead of defining everything as normalfont, there could be something like:

Latex searches for bold font. Somehow it is directed to the normal font. It thinks that it is bold, but it looks like normal font. And the same thing for font size.

Answer 1

Here is how you can do it using KOMA-Script:

\documentclass[12pt]{scrartcl}

\usepackage{etoolbox}

\makeatletter
    \patchcmd\@maketitle{\huge}{}{}{}
    \setkomafont{author}{}
    \setkomafont{date}{}
    \setkomafont{dedication}{}
    \setkomafont{publishers}{}
    \setkomafont{subject}{}
    \setkomafont{subtitle}{}
    \setkomafont{title}{}
    \setkomafont{titlehead}{}

    \setkomafont{disposition}{}
    \setkomafont{descriptionlabel}{}
    \setkomafont{pageheadfoot}{}
    \setkomafont{pagenumber}{}

    \renewcommand*\size@section{\normalsize}
    \renewcommand*\size@subsection{\normalsize}
    \renewcommand*\size@subsubsection{\normalsize}
    \renewcommand*\size@paragraph{\normalsize}
    \renewcommand*\size@subparagraph{\normalsize}
\makeatother

\title{A Title}
\author{An Author}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{A Section}
Nothing's bold.
Nothing's big.

\begin{description}
    \item[foo] bar
\end{description}

\end{document}

• If you really want everything to be 12pt, I can't see you writing any documents so long that it would justify using chapters, so scrartcl (or article) is probably the better choice than scrreprt (or report).

• I removed the formatting (using \setkomafont) of everything I could think of that might be relevant here. If you find something that has some preset formatting, you can remove that analogously.

• I patched the \huge, that usually sets the title font size, out of \@maketitle. However, given your specific wishes, you probably want to redefine \@maketitle yourself anyway. You could get rid of that line then. (You can find the original definition of \@maketitle in scrartcl.cls, if you want to use it as a starting point.)

---

Some remarks on my part:

• I can't imagine why you would want to format your document this way. I recommend you think about it again, maybe after you finished writing its content, to see how different font sizes and weights can help the reader recognize headings and ease reading.

• If, for some reason, you really want to absolutely prevent the use of different font sizes and weights by any macro in your document, you could also just redefine the corresponding commands, e.g. \let\bfseries\mdseris, \let\huge\normalsize. This would however be quite literally "quick and dirty" and deprive you yourself of all those formatting possibilities. I recommend not doing this.

Answer 2

If indeed the whole document has to be typeset in 12pt, you basically have to redefine all header styles. The font substitution trick others mentioned might get rid of the bold, but won't adjust font sizes.

There are probably several classes and packages that will help doing that. Personally I use the memoir class, where it's easy to do that kind of complete changes for headings of any level. For your case, an exemple would be:

\documentclass[a4paper,article,openany,12pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{lipsum}
%\setlrmarginsandblock{3cm}{*}{*}
%\setulmarginsandblock{2.5cm}{*}{*}
%\checkandfixthelayout

\makechapterstyle{basefont}{%
    \renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{Chapter~}
    \renewcommand*{\chapternamenum}{}
    \renewcommand{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont}
    \renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\chaptitlefont}
    \renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\chapnumfont \thechapter~---~}
    \renewcommand*{\afterchapternum}{}
    }

\setsecheadstyle{\normalfont}
\setsubsecheadstyle{\normalfont}
\setsubsubsecheadstyle{\normalfont}

\begin{document}

\chapterstyle{basefont}    

\chapter{test 1}

\lipsum[1]

\section{a section}    

\lipsum[2]
\subsection{a subsection}  

\lipsum[3]

\end{document}

It also includes the functionality of a number of other commonly used packages.