Designing headings

In Chapter 2, Formatting Text and Creating Macros, we encountered the problem of customizing headings. There has to be a consistent way to modify the font of headings, their spacing, and their numbering for the whole document. Fortunately, there's a handy package for that, and it's called titlesec. We shall use it now to design chapter and section headings.

We'll return to the example that we used in this chapter. Our goal is to create headings with this appearance:

• Centered titles
• Smaller font size
• Less space above and below
• With a sans serif font, which is a good choice for bold headings

Let's start:

1. Open the preamble.tex file, which we have already used in this chapter. Insert this line to load the titlesec package:

   \usepackage{titlesec}

2. Add this command to specify the layout and font of the chapter headings:

   \titleformat{\chapter}[display]
     {\normalfont\sffamily\Large\bfseries\centering...