2

I'd like to use sectioning commands inside macros in order to enhance them, i.e. put some kind of line before and thing after the heading.

Is it possible to use/address the optional arguments of the original commands in the macro, e.g. \subsection?

MWE

\documentclass[
11pt,
a4paper,
]
{scrartcl}

\usepackage{
lmodern,
blindtext
}


\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}


\usepackage{
multicol,
xcolor,
}


\newcommand{\specialheadline}[1]{%
{\centering
\color{gray}\rule{0.9\columnwidth}{1pt}\color{black}\par}
\subsection{#1}}


\listfiles
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
Title stuff
\end{center}
\begin{multicols*}{2}
\section{Word}
\specialheadline{ASDF}
%\specialheadline[123]{ASDF} -- THIS LINE DOES NOT WORK


\blindtext[1]
\end{multicols*}
\end{document}
henry
  • 6,594

1 Answers1

2

The following definition is probably better since it doesn't require switching back to black, because you could have a different colour preceding \specialheadline:

\newcommand{\specialheadline}[2][]{%
  {\centering
  \textcolor{gray}{\rule{0.9\columnwidth}{1pt}}\par}
  % How to check if a macro value is empty or will not create text with plain TeX conditionals?
  % https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/53091/5764
  \if\relax\detokenize{#1}\relax
    \subsection{#2}%
  \else
    \subsection[#1]{#2}%
  \fi}

It checks whether the optional argument supplied to \specialheadline is empty or not and conditions to setting the appropriate sectional unit. You could shorten the explicit conditioning to something like this:

\subsection[\if\relax\detokenize{#1}\relax #2\else #1\fi]{#2}

since the \if...\fi will be expanded as needed for the ToC.

A more reliable option would be to use xparse's command definition with \IfValueTF conditional though:

% \usepackage{xparse}% If you have LaTeX2e < 2020-10
\NewDocumentCommand{\specialheadline}{ o m }{%
  {\centering
  \textcolor{gray}{\rule{0.9\columnwidth}{1pt}}\par}
  % How to check if a macro value is empty or will not create text with plain TeX conditionals?
  % https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/53091/5764
  \subsection[\IfValueTF{#1}{#1}{#2}]{#2}}
Werner
  • 603,163