Comments on: latex: adding pagebreaks at sections

By: swgreen

swgreen — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:43:52 +0000

Use with hyperref:

When using the solution here in combination with hyperref, section links point to the page *before* the beginning of the new section. To remedy this, I used the following:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\section}{\newpage{} \@startsection
{section}
{1}
{0mm}
{-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}
{2.3ex \@plus.2ex}
{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}
\makeatother

By: TX

TX — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:25:19 +0000

Thank you so much for the \pagebreak before sectioning. I was on the exact type of fruitless Google search you mentioned looking for it.

You’re absolutely right that LaTeX documentation is spread all over the place. There’s no one convention to write code, there are thousands of random packages to download, and therefore there is a huge learning curve to using this powerful typesetting language.

Too bad. If organized and given a sleek new standard in coding and more intuitive commands, LaTeX would become much easier to use.

By: numerodix

numerodix — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:08:21 +0000

Yikes. The quirks never end, do they?

Thank you, this works beautifully!

By: Gabriel Many

Gabriel Many — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:08:08 +0000

See http://www.math.upenn.edu/tex_docs/help/faq/uktug-faq/FAQ229.html

I did a quick google search for your error, and indeed, it is recommended that you place it like this (using \makeatletter and \makeatother):

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\section}{\@startsection
{section}
{1}
{0mm}
{-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}
{2.3ex \@plus.2ex}
{\clearpage\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}
\makeatother

By: numerodix

numerodix — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:34:06 +0000

Well, I don’t know what it is, but it refuses to compile, even with a “Hello world” document. And I tried the code from that page you referenced. I keep getting the error “You can’t use `\spacefactor’ in vertical mode.” on the line where I have \section, which I don’t understand.

I tried this both on ubuntu, which ships texlive, and gentoo which still has tetex. I’m not using lyx, just a regular editor.

By: Gabriel Many

Gabriel Many — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:19:34 +0000

I have tried it on two different machines running two different tex distributions on two different operating systems with two different version of Lyx and it has worked both times. I did note that the comments messed things up when I cut and pasted into the Lyx preamble in Windows, so it is possible that you are having some sort of error in that sense. Nevertheless, the link I provided in my previous post gives more detailed information about the options. As I said, I went into report.cls and copied the section definition to make sure that I got the font style right, since basically I am just redefining section to have a “clearpage” added to the style.

In the end, I don’t really know that I’ll use this, but it seems that it could be useful to have a style that causes a pagebreak without having to start a whole new chapter.

Here it is without the comments:

\renewcommand{\section}{\@startsection
{section}
{1}
{0mm}
{-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}
{2.3ex \@plus.2ex}
{\clearpage\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}

By: numerodix

numerodix — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:08:47 +0000

Have you tested this with \tableofcontents? I pasted your code right into the preamble of a report I’m writing right now, changed the document type to report and I get this:

pdfTeX warning (ext4): destination with the
same identifier (name{page.1}) has been already used, duplicate ignored

\relax
l.84 \newpage
[1] (./main.tex
! You can’t use `\spacefactor’ in vertical mode.
\@->\spacefactor
\@m
l.1 \section
{Introduction}

Still evil lurking somewhere..

By: Gabriel Many

Gabriel Many — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:54:43 +0000

Well, after some research, it looks like a complex way of doing this is to redefine section formating in the preamble. See: http://theoval.sys.uea.ac.uk/~nlct/latex/thesis/node9.html#tab:secnum

The basic format is:
\@startsection{}{}{}{}{}{}

Which led me to create the following (using what I believe are the defaults for the report class):

\renewcommand{\section}{\@startsection
{section}% % the name
{1}% % the level
{0mm}% % the indent
{-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
{2.3ex \@plus.2ex}%
{\clearpage\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}

The thing I added was the \clearpage
Now, I’d prefer to tell it to just use class defaults for the beforeskip and afterskip commands, but I don’t know how to do so, so I used the actual value I found in report.cls.

Do you have something more elegant?

By: numerodix

numerodix — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:45:43 +0000

Actually, there is a numbering/toc bug with this method and I’m unable to use it myself any longer. I don’t know exactly why, and debugging latex is a nightmare.

By: Gabriel Many

Gabriel Many — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:05:48 +0000

So, this worked, but…it gave each of my unnumber sections (section*, I’m using lyx) a number and stuck them namelessly (just an asterisk) into the table of contents. If you can, help me! I will post if I solve this.