Section title centering

Question

I am writing my PhD thesis in LaTeX. When I tried to center the section titles, awkwardly, it compiles without table of contents but whenever I write \tableofcontents an error occurs.

For centering, I wrote down

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}[hang]{\normalfont\bfseries\filcenter}{\thesection}{1em}{}
\titleformat{\subsection}[hang]{\normalfont\bfseries}{\thesubsection}{1em}{}

Can anyone help please?

Possible duplicate: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8546/section-heading-centering-problem or http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/278653/title-of-section-in-center-thesis-writing?lq=1 — , Jun 24 '16 at 14:39
@Bernard: Posting an answer perhaps? The question is vague, however ... — , Jul 05 '16 at 19:06
@Christian Hupfer: I'll do it in a moment. Might be useful to show the difference between hang, block and display styles. — Bernard, Jul 05 '16 at 19:25
@Johannes_B: I had completely forgotten. Thanks for reminding me. Done! — Bernard, Jul 17 '16 at 12:54

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 17 '16 at 12:53

Titlesec defines several shapes for section titles. Among which:

[hang] is LaTeX default shape for section: label and section title aligned, staring from the left margin;
[block] puts label and section title in a paragraph. Useful for centred section titles or with picture inclusion, for instance;
[display] outs the label in a paragraph of its own, like the default \chapter;
[framed]: like display, but framed.

For the alignment of titles, titlesec defines commands such as \filcenter, \filleftor \filright, to be used preferably to \centering, \raggedright or \raggedleft (there are small differences as to spacing).

So here, you can write

\titleformat{\section}[block]{\normalfont\bfseries\filcenter}{\thesection}{1em}{}

As nice classical variant,(for my taste…) is this:

\titleformat{\section}[block]{\normalfont\scshape\filcenter}{\§\,\thesection}{1em}{}

Section title centering

1 Answers1