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.
- NTG classes
- macros/latex/contrib/ntgclass (or browse the directory)
- parskip.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/misc/parskip.sty
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=parskip