Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!tone.rice.edu!dorai
From: dorai@tone.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Indentation of paragraphs versus space between pa
Summary: Combining the worst of both worlds and getting the best!
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.194124.18866@rice.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 91 19:41:24 GMT
References: <1991Mar14.170116.152@otago.ac.nz> <1991Mar14.163259.17221@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 28

In article <1991Mar14.163259.17221@csrd.uiuc.edu> eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout) writes:
>graeme@otago.ac.nz writes:
>
>>Indenting paragraphs versus space between paragraphs
>
>Controversial subject. Let's hear it.

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.)

Incidentally, this style really saves space -- including the tiny
par-indentaton space!

--d