[Tex/LaTex] Producing centered asterisk to indicate new section

paragraphssectioningsymbolstypography

In a text (or a passage of a text) that is not subdivided by headings — say, an essay –, a common tool to indicate the start of a new section is a simple asterisk (or other symbol), usually centered, but not necessarily so.

\documentclass[pagesize,fontsize=12pt,paper=a5,DIV=9]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blindtext\par
\noindent
\makebox[\textwidth][c]{*}\par
\noindent
\blindtext
\end{document}

Something like this is necessary or useful because a mere blank line might not be clear enough, e.g. when the preceding paragraph ends with a line that's almost full, and/or when the start of the new section coincides with the start of a new page.

What I'd like to know is if there's an implementation of something like this somewhere in a *TeX package. Such an implementation would have to deal with a few things that make the whole thing a bit less simple than my example suggests:

  • the asterisk must always stick to the last line of the section whose end it marks, i.e. it must not be split off onto a new page

  • but: that last line might also be the last line of the page. In a one-sided document, it might be okay to \enlargethispage, if there's no footer that it might clash with. In a two-sided document this might be okay as well, but you might want to take into account readers who are sensitive enough to notice the difference in \textheight on a doube-page spread caused by the asterisk, and finding it awkward. Jan Tschichold, in his »Penguin Rules«, by the way, does not find it awkward.

  • even if there's no footer, it might clash with footnotes. Such a clash might be even harder to anticipate.

There's probably some more things that need to be addressed. These are the first that came to my mind, and some of them have kept me from writing a satisfactory implementation of this myself so far — which is why I'd like to know if someone else has tried it.

update

As suggested by Ulrike, I tried memoir's \fancybreak. Here's an example that can be compared side-by-side to what Marc and egreg suggested.

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,twoside=false]{memoir}
\usepackage{typearea}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}
\typearea{10}
%typearea etc. are just to create conditions identical to my scrartcl tests of Marc's egreg's solutions
\begin{document}
\kant[1-4]
\fancybreak{* * *}
\kant[1-4]
\end{document}

\fancybreak doesn't seem to tie the asterisks to the paragraph that they finish off.

Best Answer

This is how I'd do it:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}
\newcommand{\finishsection}[1][0]{%
  \ifhmode\unskip\fi % to emulate what \par does
  \ifnum#1>0 \enlargethispage*{#1\baselineskip}\fi
  \par\nopagebreak
  \vbox to 3\baselineskip{\centering
    \vss
    $*$\qquad$*$\qquad$*$\par
    \vss
  }
}
\addtolength{\textheight}{-7\baselineskip}
\begin{document}
\kant[1-3]
\finishsection
\kant[4-5]
\end{document}

If you change -7\baselineskip into -8\baselineskip the asterisks will be moved to the next page. In such a situation you can do

\finishsection[1]

that will execute \enlargethispage*{1\baselineskip}. Maybe an automatic version with needspace is feasible, but in quality book production I'd go for manual check.

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