Temporarily changing section formatting

Question

My current problem is that while I've figured out how to control the vertical spacing around sections and subsections, in one chapter my "sections" don't really deserve the elevated formatting. What I'd like is to have LaTeX format them with section number (3.1, for example) and a bold header, and then start the paragraph on the same line, almost as though it were a glossary item. In HTML it would look like this:

<b>3.3 Profiles:</b> This worksheet contains...

I expect I should start with the titlesec package. After that...is there a way to temporarily redefine the \section layout (for this chapter only), or is there a way to relabel the sections as paragraphs (or something), or some other alternative?

Answer 1

The following is a list approach, using the enumerate environment that normally produces single numbers (1, 2, 3 and so on) for the main list level.

With the package enumitem the labels can be modified to include also the chapter counter. This package adds optional arguments to \begin{enumerate} for the label (many other options are added as well), i.e., \begin{enumerate}[label=xyz].

The notation \arabic* is provided to represent the current list number. The current chapter number can be printed with \thechapter (this is always available in LaTeX, also outside of enumerate environments, as well as the other counters \thesection, \thesubsection etc.).

The required format can therefore be represented as \thechapter.\arabic*. Including bold this leads to:

\begin{enumerate}[label=\textbf{\thechapter.\arabic*}]

The next step is to also include a title for each item. This is not provided by enumitem as far as I know. Therefore you need to write a small wrapper command that calls \item (which produces the numbered label) and adds the argument of the wrapper command in bold afterwards:

\newcommand{\itemtitle}[1]{%
\item \textbf{#1:}%
}

The last thing is to fix the indentation, as enumerate lists are indented by default. To remove this you can set leftmargin=* for the enumerate environment.

MWE:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{enumitem}

\newcommand{\itemtitle}[1]{%
\item \textbf{#1:}%
}

\begin{document}
\setcounter{chapter}{2} % skip to chapter 3
\chapter{Worksheet overview}
This chapter provides all the worksheets.
\begin{enumerate}[label=\textbf{\thechapter.\arabic*}, leftmargin=*]
\itemtitle{Preliminaries} In this worksheet the basics are discussed. There are many basics so they span over multiple lines. After this you know all the basics but you don't know what comes next.
\itemtitle{What comes next} The next steps are covered in this worksheet.
\itemtitle{Profiles} This worksheet contains profiles as well as antifiles, prefiles and postfiles.
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}

Result:

If you don't want the paragraphs to be indented you can also set wide=0pt instead of leftmargin=*: