The TeX FAQ

Frequently Asked Question List for TeX

Formatting

Zero paragraph indent

The conventional way of typesetting running text has no separation between paragraphs, and the first line of each paragraph in a block of text indented.

In contrast, one common convention for typewritten text was to have no indentation of paragraphs; such a style is often required for “brutalist” publications such as technical manuals, and in styles that hanker after typewritten manuscripts, such as officially-specified dissertation formats.

Anyone can see, after no more than a moment’s thought, that if the paragraph indent is zero, the paragraphs must be separated by blank space: otherwise it is sometimes going to be impossible to see the breaks between paragraphs.

The simple-minded approach to zero paragraph indentation is thus:

\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}

and in the very simplest text, it’s a fine solution.

However, the non-zero \parskip interferes with lists and the like, and the result looks pretty awful. The parskip package patches things up to look reasonable; it’s not perfect, but it deals with most problems.

The Netherlands Users’ Group’s set of classes includes an article equivalent (artikel3) and a report equivalent (rapport3) whose design incorporates zero paragraph indent and non-zero paragraph skip.

FAQ ID: Q-parskip