Vertical spacing before title within minipages with titlesec

Question

I'm using the titlesec package to style my section titles, including centring and colouring them. Sometimes my sections appear in a minipage because I often have long narrow diagrams that run the length of the page, and I want the text alongside it. However, I'm finding that when the \section occurs at the start of a minipage, there's extra vertical space at the top of the page. The following MWE shows this:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[a6paper,showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{headcol}{cmyk}{0,.75,.75,.2}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\newcommand\sectheadfont{\fontsize{12pt}{14.4pt}\selectfont\color{headcol}}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\sectheadfont}{}{0pt}{\filcenter}
\begin{document}
\section{Foo}
\clearpage
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}
\section{Bar}
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

The first page has no space before the title, while the second page has 1em of space above it. If I comment out the \titleformat line, this doesn't happen. Moreover, if I remove \color{headcol} from the definition of \sectheadfont it doesn't. Something about the way I'm requested a coloured heading is responsible for the extra space.

I know I can manually sort it out with a \vspace{-1em} at the start of the minipage, but this seems a bit fragile as the exact space needed seems to be dependent on the font size and other such things, and not always exactly 1em. Can anyone help me fix this in my preamble?

@Ivan That does fix it in the MWE, but it will cause problems in my real code as I typically have two minipage environments of unequal heights next to each other, and rely on the [t] to align them relative to each other. This is perhaps a clue as to why the MWE is incorrectly aligned, though I'm not sure I can interpret that clue. — richard, Apr 25 '21 at 15:13

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 25 '21 at 15:46

I honestly cannot understand the reason for a structure of this type. Anyway, to remove the space before the minipage should be enough:

\vspace{-\abovedisplayskip}

In the MWE below I have defined the new strangeenv environment, but you can also do without it and simply use:

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}
  \vspace{-\abovedisplayskip}
\section{Bar}
...
\end{minipage}

MWE

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[a6paper,showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{headcol}{cmyk}{0,.75,.75,.2}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\newcommand\sectheadfont{\fontsize{12pt}{14.4pt}\selectfont\color{headcol}}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\sectheadfont}{}{0pt}{\filcenter}
\newenvironment{strangeenv}[1]
  {\begin{minipage}[t]{#1}
    \vspace{-\abovedisplayskip}}
  {\end{minipage}}
\begin{document}
\section{Foo}
\kant[1]
\clearpage
\begin{strangeenv}{0.8\textwidth}
\section{Bar}
\kant[9]
\end{strangeenv}
\end{document}

John Kormylo · Answer 2 · 2021-04-26T14:10:51.147

If you want to run text and tall narrow images side by side, I recommend paracol.

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[a6paper,showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{headcol}{cmyk}{0,.75,.75,.2}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\newcommand\sectheadfont{\fontsize{12pt}{14.4pt}\selectfont\color{headcol}}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\sectheadfont}{}{0pt}{\filcenter}
\usepackage{paracol}
\globalcounter{section}
\begin{document}
\section{Foo}
\clearpage
\setcolumnwidth{0.8\textwidth}
\begin{paracol}{2}
\section{Bar}
\switchcolumn
\noindent\rule{\columnwidth}{\textheight}
\end{paracol}
\end{document}

Vertical spacing before title within minipages with titlesec

2 Answers2