[comp.text.tex] Indentation of paragraphs versus space between paREAD/NEW/FOLLOWUP

dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) (03/16/91)

In article <1991Mar14.194124.18866@rice.edu>, dorai@tone.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram) writes:
> Indeed.  BTW, most of the books (novels) I've seen that were printed
> in a certain country [famous for its books!] appear to favor a
> do-nothing paragraph separating style, i.e., neither indentation nor
> vertical space.
 
> Thus, the only aid to recognizing a new paragraph is that the trailing
> line of the previous paragraph doesn't quite make it to the right
> margin.  (Ergo, this style will not work for raggedright text, hence I
> can't demonstrate it in this article.)
 
> Strangely enough, the result is very pleasing, and not misleading, as
> graeme@otago's reasoning might suggest, since care is taken to ensure
> that a sentence that finishes a paragraph doesn't ever end on the
> right margin.  (In LaTeX, this can be accomplished by ending all
> paragraphs with a ~\mbox{ }.)  (A further guideline seems to be never
> start a sentence on a page unless it starts a paragraph.)

Just felt the need to push my traditional "never do procedurally
what you can do structurally" argument:

The need for the mbox could be alleviated by setting \parfillskip
to say 1em plus 1fill. This guarantees at least 1em of space at
the end of a paragraph. One could also set penalties to encourage
TeX to leave widow lines at the top of the page to make clear
that a near-top-of-page paragraph is unambigously marked.

Personally, I prefer the traditional no space + indent paragraph
marking. Victor, the arguments about space around a list also
relate to space around a displayed equation. 

-dh

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