Question

In my LaTeX document I’ve got a table of contents that is automatically generated by collecting everything that is of the form \chapter.

However, I’ve got an acknowledgements chapter before the table of contents and I don’t want it to be automatically labelled ‘Chapter 1’ or captured in the table of contents. Should I be avoiding \chapter altogether and use \section instead? I want to keep the font/formatting that other chapters have though.

Answer 1

The usual way to handle that kind of thing is with the \frontmatter command. Put it after the \begin{document}, and then put \mainmatter right before the \chapter you want to correspond to chapter 1. This may only work in the book class. If you’re using \chapter in a report, then \chapter* should also create a chapter that has no number and won’t show up in the table of contents.