[texhax] Control blank area at beginning of chapters

[Thomas Dukleth]

Sorry that my last few changes were not reported by LyX at compile time. 
Apparently my attempt to cheat and load the tocloft package after memoir
had loaded its tocloft emulation merely temporarily fooled error catching
when compiling with LyX.

I have corrected the errors and tested on the command line.  Any advice
about creating blank lines without triggering the underfull \hbox badness
warnings would be appreciated.

My new attempt to demonstrate the issue for my original question follows.

On Thu, October 23, 2008 9:58 am, Lars Madsen wrote:
> Thomas Dukleth wrote:
>> I am using the memoir document class for a book and would like to
>> control
>> or eliminate the large vertical blank area at the beginning of each new
>> chapter.
>>

[..]

I have commented out my custom chapter style based on the memoir class and
used the following code based on the titlesec package.  My question about
modifying this or some other code remains.

\titleformat{\chapter}[display]{\filcenter\sc\Huge}{\thechapter}{0pt}{}{}

>> How can I modify this code or something else to control the large
>> vertical
>> blank area at the beginning of each new chapter?
>>
>>
>
> it is a bit hard to know exactly what space you are talking about. Could
> you post a minimal (but full) document displaying a sample chapter, such
> that we can just copy'n'paste to our own systems and see if we can fix
> your problem. That makes it a lot easier for us.

[...]

Look at how the table of contents page title, "CONTENTS", appears at a
higher point on the page than chapter titles.  Before modifying the table
of contents title using the following code, the table of contents title
had appeared at a lower point on the page much more like the chapter
titles.

\def\tableofcontents{\section*{\centering CONTENTS}\@starttoc{toc}}

Chapter titles in the minimal LaTeX document are "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS", "THE
HOUSE OF MAPUHI", and "THE WHALE TOOTH".

The following code may also be downloaded for the next month from
http://pastebin.com/m7619106 in case email line wrapping breaks a long
comment line resulting in an error.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Begin Preamble. %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\documentclass[12pt,english,oldfontcommands]{memoir}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{titletoc}

% Memoir emulates tocloft somewhat.
% \usepackage{subfigure}
% \usepackage[titles,subfigure]{tocloft}
%% \usepackage[titles]{tocloft}

\usepackage{fix-cm}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage{graphics}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\usepackage{babel}

\geometry{verbose,paperwidth=5.5in,paperheight=8.5in}

\makeatletter
\pdfpageheight 8.5in
\pdfpagewidth 5.5in
\paperheight 8.5in
\paperwidth 5.5in
\addtolength\topmargin{-0.25in}
\addtolength\oddsidemargin{-0.25in}
\addtolength\evensidemargin{-0.5in}
\addtolength\textheight{1.25in}
\addtolength\textwidth{0.75in}
\setlength\headsep{12pt}
\setlength\marginparsep{0pt}
\setlength\marginparwidth{0pt}
\setlength\footskip{0pt}

% \renewcommand{\aftertoctitle}{\thispagestyle{empty}\afterchaptertitle}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Superseded by titlesec package commands
% \makechapterstyle{nonumber}{%
%     \renewcommand{\printchaptername}{}
%     \renewcommand{\printchapternum}{ }
% }
%
% \chapterstyle{nonumber}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{\markright{#1}{}}
\renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\markboth{#1}{}}
\pagestyle{myheadings}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Original suggestion
% http://for.mat.bham.ac.uk/pgweb/archive/2000/pgweb_academic_latex.html
%%
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]{\filcenter\sc\Huge}{\chaptertitlename\,\,\thechapter}{0pt}{}{}

\titleformat{\part}[display]{\filcenter\scshape\Huge}{\thepart}{0pt}{}{}
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]{\filcenter\scshape\Huge}{\thechapter}{0pt}{}{}
\titleformat{\section}[display]{\filcenter\scshape\Huge}{\thesection}{0pt}{}{}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Original suggestions
% http://allmybrain.com/2007/11/20/a-few-latex-tips/
\def\tableofcontents{\section*{\centering CONTENTS}\@starttoc{toc}}

% Next suggestions fail as undefined and merely defining them naturally
% does nothing because there is no linked code using them in the memoir
% class.
%
% change section headers and page numbers to normal instead of bold font
% \renewcommand{\cftsecfont}{
% \normalfont
% }
\def\cftsecfont{\normalfont}
% \renewcommand{\cftsecpagefont}{%
% \normalfont
% }
\def\cftsecpagefont{\normalfont}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Original suggestion
% http://www.prashblog.com/2008/08/remove-dots-in-table-of-contents-in.html
% Does this work?
%
\renewcommand{\@dotsep}{10000}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\makeatother

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% End Preamble. %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\begin{document}
\frontmatter
\thispagestyle{empty}

\begin{center}
{\fontsize{30pt}{36pt}\selectfont{
\hfill{}\\}}
{\fontsize{36pt}{42pt}\selectfont{S}}{\fontsize{30pt}{36pt}\selectfont{OUTH}}
{\fontsize{36pt}{42pt}\selectfont{ S}}{\fontsize{30pt}{36pt}\selectfont{EA}}
{\fontsize{36pt}{42pt}\selectfont{
T}}{\fontsize{30pt}{36pt}\selectfont{ALES\\}}
{\fontsize{36pt}{42pt}\selectfont{
\hfill{}\\}}
{\LARGE{
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\
bla, bla, bla\ldots{}\\
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\}}

\end{center}
\fontsize{12pt}{15pt}\selectfont{}

\newpage{}
\thispagestyle{empty}

{\parindent=0em
Library Publication Data.

{\LARGE{
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\
bla, bla, bla\ldots{}\\
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\}}}

\newpage{}

\thispagestyle{empty}
\markboth{SOUTH SEA TALES}{CONTENTS}
\renewcommand{\contentsname}{CONTENTS}
\tableofcontents

\newpage{}

\chapter*{ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{}Acknowledgements}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\markboth{SOUTH SEA TALES}{ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS}

{\parindent=0em

>From the Project Gutenberg Ebook notices,\\
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/soset11.txt:\\

{\LARGE{
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\
bla, bla, bla\ldots{}\\
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\}}}

\newpage{}

\mainmatter

\chapter*{THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{1.}The House of Mapuhi}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\markboth{SOUTH SEA TALES}{THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI}
\lettrine{D}{espite}
the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the \emph{Aorai} handled easily in
the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to
just outside the suck of the surf.

{\LARGE{
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\
bla, bla, bla\ldots{}\\
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\}}

\newpage{}

``Then give me something to eat, for I am hungry,'' said Nauri,
complacently. ``And after that we will sleep, for I am weary. And
tomorrow we will have more talk about the house before we sell the
pearl. It will be better if we take the thousand French in cash. Money
is ever better than credit in buying goods from the traders.''

\chapter*{THE WHALE TOOTH}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{2.}The Whale Tooth}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\markboth{SOUTH SEA TALES}{THE WHALE TOOTH}
\lettrine{I}{t}
was in the early days in Fiji, when John Starhurst arose in the
mission house at Rewa Village and announced his intention of carrying
the gospel throughout all Viti Levu.

{\LARGE{
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\
bla, bla, bla\ldots{}\\
\hfill{}\\
\hfill{}\\}}

\end{document}


Thomas Dukleth
Agogme
109 E 9th Street, 3D
New York, NY  10003
USA
http//www.agogme.com
212-674-3783