[Tex/LaTex] Removing chapter numbers from section headings in memoir

Question

I don't want the chapter number in the section headings:

That can be achieved by \counterwithout{section}{chapter}, which works fine as long as one doesn't have more than one chapter at a time:

Because then the section counter also doesn't get reset in the next chapter, which of course is also odd.

Now I found two solutions for that, both redefining \thesection, see the following example:

\documentclass{memoir}
%\counterwithout{section}{chapter} %remove chapter number from headings
%\renewcommand*\thesection{\arabic{section}}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{\thesection}{\@arabic\c@section}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\chapter{First chapter}
\section{First section in first chapter}
\chapter{Second chapter}
\section{First section in second chapter}
\end{document}

Commented out line 3 seemed to work, but looking at memoir.cls I saw the definition of \thesection differed, so I adapted it and it also seems to work, but I'm not sure if it doesn't have any side effects, or if there would be a better way of doing it.

Also so far (before glueing my chapters together) I had used the \counterwithout approach. If I don't do that anymore, would I get chapter numbers appearing in other places other than the section headings? Or will that be taken care of by the redefinition of \thesection?

Answer 1

Using

\renewcommand{\thesection}{\arabic{section}}

is similar to

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\thesection}{\@arabic\c@section}
\makeatother

so use the former. Sectional numbering is defined recursively by default, meaning that if its removed from \section, it'll be removed from \subsection, \subsubsection, ...

However, the chapter number may show elsewhere still, like in the captions of floats (like figure and table), since that's the default setting for memoir.