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In the documentation of amsart. AMS Author Handbook: Journal Classes, it is said that

\specialsection differs from\section mainly in the formatting of the heading.

It is listed between \part and \section.

Grätzer said in his More Math into LaTeX (4ed and 5ed) that:

There is also the seldom used top level \specialsection command. Articles do not have parts and chapters, but sometimes a long article may require further division using the \specialsection command.

However, \part is defined in the amsart.cls, as other document classes (such as article.cls) do. And I notice that \specialsection shares the same counter with \section, and the typesetting formats of the two commands are rather similar (a little difference in fonts and spacing).

\def\specialsection{\@startsection{section}{1}%
  \z@{\linespacing\@plus\linespacing}{.5\linespacing}%
  {\normalfont\centering}}
\def\section{\@startsection{section}{1}%
  \z@{.7\linespacing\@plus\linespacing}{.5\linespacing}%
  {\normalfont\scshape\centering}}

So I wonder how it is used.

BTW, the commented source code of AMS classes (amsclass.pdf) says that

Specialsection correlates to our inhouse Z-head.

And I think it is also difficult to understand.

barbara beeton
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Leo Liu
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  • I guess that particular in-house styles redefine \specialsection, possibly not to have a number, but, indeed, the documentation is not very clear. – egreg Sep 26 '16 at 10:19
  • the documentation is not only not very clear, but clearly wrong regarding \part. i shall investigate, but may not be able to find anything definitive, the perpetrators being either deceased or long gone from ams. – barbara beeton Sep 26 '16 at 14:04

1 Answers1

10

The documentation file Instructions for Preparation of Papers and Monographs AMS-LaTeX (instrl.pdf) is woefully out of date, and about to be discarded.

New documentation has been created in the form of three author handbooks, for journal articles (AMS Author Handbook, Journal Classes), monographs and textbooks, and proceedings articles (links to all from this web page).

In the journals handbook, headings are covered on page 13, but not much detail is given. here are the salient differences:

  • \part is set in bold and numbered, although the number (for some unexplained reason) is normal weight.

  • \section is numbered and set in small caps (except for properly identified math).

  • \specialsection is numbered (with the same counter as \section) and set in the normal font, but content remains in upper- and lowercase as input.

For journal articles, none of these headings are re-used as running heads, so short forms (although provided for \part and \section) are not used.

It will take a while for these handbooks to reach CTAN and TeX Live as part of the amscls collection, owing to the manner of their compilation (multiple source files with conditional inclusion of relevant segments) and the TeX Live requirement for inclusion of source code. When installed there, the instrl files will be removed.

barbara beeton
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