Text Formatting ⇒ Some unusual indentation and spacing

[fleetadmiral73]

I don't understand some of the indentation. For example, in section 2.1 (Cephalic). Function and Stimulus are at different indentations. Is this by design?

Also, there are no spaces between the aforementioned lines. I thought I took care of that by hitting return twice in the .tex file.

[gmedina]

Hi,

standard LaTeX suppresses indentation for the first paragraph after a sectional heading, as the following MWE illustrates:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\section{Test section}

First paragraph.

Second paragraph.
\end{document}

If you want to indent those first paragraphs too, you could load the indentfirst package:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{indentfirst}

\begin{document}
\section{Test section}

First paragraph.

Second paragraph.
\end{document}

[fleetadmiral73]

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Suppressing indentation is particularly helpful for me, since I rarely write consecutive paragraphs for my notes.

I'll read up some more on line spacing and see if I can sort that out. It may be I just need to read more about standard formatting.

[gmedina]

Thank you for the thoughtful response...

You're welcome.

...I'll read up some more on line spacing and see if I can sort that out...

Sorry, I overlooked that in your initial post. Standard LaTeX doesn't add extra vertical space to separate consecutive paragraphs. The start of a new paragraph (with the exception mentioned before) is signaled by indentation.

If you want to add vertical spacing between paragraphs, you have three options:

1) The "manual" option: at the end of every paragraph add one of the commands \smallskip, \medskip, or \bigskip. In this case indentation is superfluous so you could consider suppressing it by adding

Code: Select all

\setlength\parindent{0pt}

to the preamble of your document.

2) Load the parskip package.

3) Use a document class (for example the ones from the KOMA-Script bundle) that implements commands to automatically obtain additional spacing between paragraphs.