\section[short title]{full title}
If the <short title> is present, it is used both for the table of contents and for the page heading. The usual answer to people who complain that their title is too big for the running head is to suggest that they the optional argument.
However, using the same text for the table of contents as for the running head may also be unsatisfactory: if your chapter titles are seriously long (like those of a Victorian novel), a valid and rational scheme is to have a shortened table of contents entry, and a really terse entry in the running head. One of the problems is the tendency of page headings to be set in capitals (which take up more space); so why not set headings as written for “ordinary” reading? It’s not possible to do so with unmodified LaTeX, but the fancyhdr package provides a command\
nouppercase
for use in its header (and footer) lines to suppress
LaTeX’s uppercasing tendencies. Classes in the KOMA-script
bundle don’t uppercase in the first place.
In fact, the sectioning commands use ‘mark’ commands to pass
information to the page headers. For example, \
chapter
uses
\
chaptermark
, \
section
uses \
sectionmark
, and so on. With
this knowledge, one can achieve a three-layer structure for chapters:
\chapter[middling version]{verbose version} \chaptermark{terse version}
which should supply the needs of every taste.
Chapters, however, have it easy: hardly any book design puts a page header on a chapter start page. In the case of sections, one has typically to take account of the nature of the\
*mark
commands:
the thing that goes in the heading is the first mark on the page (or,
failing any mark, the last mark on any previous page). As a result
the recipe for sections is more tiresome:
\section[middling version]{verbose version% \sectionmark{terse version}} \sectionmark{terse version}
(the first \
sectionmark
deals with the header of the page the
\
section
command falls on, and the second deal with subsequent
pages; note that here, you need the optional argument to \
section
,
even if “middling version” is in fact the same text as
“long version”.)
\section[middling version][terse version]{verbose version}
As a result, it is always possible for users of memoir to tailor the header text to fit, with very little trouble.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=runheadtoobig