formattingsectioningsections-paragraphs
I am looking for a way to change the margin form the left of the titles in LaTeX. I´ve added a picture to clarify my concern:
Is there a way, to change the margins of the titles of the sections, and only the titles, and not the entire paragraph below?
Here is a solution with titleps. I define a wideoddhead pagestyle that does what you want (if I understood well) without having to change margins. I had to modify the sectrion formatting. Also simplified your preamble:
\documentclass[10pt, letterpaper, twoside]{article}
\usepackage[vmargin=0.5in, left=1.25in, right=0.75in, headheight=0.75in, headsep=12pt, footskip=30pt, textheight=670pt]{geometry}
\usepackage[pagestyles, indentafter]{titlesec}
\newpagestyle{wideoddhead}{%
\setheadrule{1pt}
\widenhead[0pt][0pt]{0.5in}{0pt}
\sethead[\footnotesize\bfseries\thepage][][\footnotesize\itshape{\sectiontitle}]{10/22/2014}{\footnotesize\textbf{My Title}}{\footnotesize\bfseries\thepage}
}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\bfseries\large}{\llap{\makebox[0.5in][l]{\thesection.}}}{0pt}{}
\pagestyle{wideoddhead}
\raggedbottom
\begin{document}
\section{The First Section}
Text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text.
As you can see, the header is aligned with the text. I am trying to get the header aligned with the section number while keeping the text aligned with the section title.
\pagebreak
\section{The Next Section}
It also gets really messed up for two-sided documents, if the left and right margin are set to different values. Moving only section text would alleviate this problem.
\end{document}
Best Answer
For standard classes (not KOMA script classes as leandriis has pointed out) you can use the titlesec package to change the format and spacing of sections, subsections and so on. See page 4 for an explanation of
\titleformatand\titlespacingand their optional arguments which I have not shown here for simplicity.I have changed the
<left>argument of the\titlespacingcommand to an arbitry value of1em(which is usually 0). Change it however you want. The other values in the code below are taken from subsection 9.2. Standard Classes on page 23 and should be the values usually used by LaTeX.The example below indents sections. Indenting subsections and subsubsections works in the same way.