tom sgouros: Re: [texhax] how to redefine chapter

[Paul Tremblay]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 12:37:21PM -0400, Tom Sgouros wrote:
> 
> 
> Forgot to "reply all" and wondered if you were actually on the texhax
> list.
> 
>  -tom
> 
> 
> The book version of \chapter* calls on \@makeschapterhead, which is
> defined like this:
> 
> \def\@makeschapterhead#1{%
>   \vspace*{50\p@}%
>   {\parindent \z@ \raggedright
>     \normalfont
>     \interlinepenalty\@M
>     \Huge \bfseries  #1\par\nobreak
>     \vskip 40\p@
>   }}
> 
> The \vspace* at the top is your culprit.  Remove it or increase it or
> whatever you want.  You'll have to put your redefinition inside a
> \makeatletter...\makeatother pair or inside a new class file.
> 
> This kind of stuff is pretty easily found by grepping through the base
> LaTeX class files.  I suspect that somewhere there's a book.dtx, too,
> but I don't know for sure.
> 

Thanks. This works like I want it to. Actually, I am converting an XML
file to LaTeX (using LaTeX as the formatter) and need to tell LaTeX to
break on odd pages. I can't use \newpage, so I use \chapter*{}, which
works fine.

(If I were more knowledgable about LaTeX, I could define my own
commands to break on odd or break on any.) 

I am on the mailing list; I just joined. 

I have a very similar question about getting rid of the extra space in
the \begin{center} command. I had planned to start another thread on
it, but now I see I am going to get pretty much the same answer. I
need to find what the default command is and redefine it. 

So where would I look? What exactly are the base latex classes? 

My installation is /usr/TeX (on a linux system). There are numerous
subdirectories below this, and each one seems to contain duplicates.
For example, the font info seems to be in several different
directories. 

Thanks

Paul

-- 

************************
*Paul Tremblay         *
*phthenry at iglou.com    *
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