Changing the section title style for an article document type

Question

I have just started working on my master's thesis with my universities latex template. It uses the 'article' document class for it. I have tweaked it here and there a bit to make it more to my liking. I wanted to change the way the section headers looked like to make it look better.

So, I want to be able to change the font and font size, style etc. I would also like to add horizontal lines to give it more style. It would roughly look like this:

-------------------
   INTRODUCTION
-------------------

Well something with more decoration than the default style atleast.

Can anyone tell me how can I make these changes? I would also be useful if I can find some already implemented section styles.

Answer 1

The titlesec package or secsty might have the resources you need.

If it's a longer project, look at the memoir document class, which has more options, but will involve more work to conform to university guidelines.

Here's a very quick sectsty version of what you want.

\usepackage{sectsty}
\sectionfont{%
\sectionrule{2ex}{1pt}{-1ex}{1pt}%
}

And to do roughly the same thing with titlesec do the following:

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}
  {\titlerule%
  \normalfont\bfseries\Large}
  {\thesection}{1em}{}[\titlerule]

I think I prefer the titlesec version, because titlesec is a better overall package, in my opinion. If you want to change the thickness of the titlerules here, the second one breaks if you add an argument to it. So put \newcommand{\trule}{\titlerule[1pt]} or whatever thickness you want between the \usepackage and the \titleformat commands. Then replace each \titlerule with \trule.

As for a memoir version? Work it out yourself! The memoir documentation is excellent.

Answer 2

Have a look at the titlesec package. It comes with quite many features that are definitely useful for you. Also, if I remember correctly, there are examples of usage in the appendix of the documentation.