Reducing the space between section number and section title

Question

I create the fourth-level section title following this link.

With the below code snippet, the fourth level is created but I want to reduce the spacing between the section number and the section title, e.g., 1.1.1.1 D1.

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\paragraph{\@startsection{paragraph}{4}{\z@}%
    {-2.5ex\@plus -1ex \@minus -.25ex}%
    {1.25ex \@plus .25ex}%
    {\normalfont\normalsize\bfseries}}
\makeatother
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{4} % how many sectioning levels to assign numbers to
\setcounter{tocdepth}{4}    % how many sectioning levels to show in ToC
\begin{document}
    \tableofcontents
    \section{A}
    \subsection{B}
    \subsubsection{C1}
    \paragraph{D1}
    \paragraph{D2}
\end{document}

Here is the figure to illustrate my confusion:

I just want to reduce the space which is represented as the red rectangle.

Any help is appreciated!

Are you referring to the space within the ToC or the actual text? For the latter, see the space between . and next sentence. — Werner, Jun 08 '23 at 04:45

tush · Accepted Answer · 2023-06-08T10:57:51.250

You need to change the last length in l@paragraph (l stands for "list"):

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand*\l@paragraph{\@dottedtocline{4}{7.0em}{3.5em}}\makeatother
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{4} % how many sectioning levels to assign numbers to
\setcounter{tocdepth}{4}    % how many sectioning levels to show in ToC
\begin{document}
    \tableofcontents
    \section{A}
    \subsection{B}
    \subsubsection{C1}
    \paragraph{D1}
    \paragraph{D2}
\end{document}

To clarify:

Each header has a l@ command that appears in article.cls (located in most tex ditros at texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls). The original values was 4.1em.

Just before l@paragraph you can find similar commands for section (l@section) and subsection.

Reducing the space between section number and section title

1 Answers1