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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Indenting first paragraph
Message-ID: <1991May17.153059.24466@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 17 May 91 15:30:59 GMT
References: <_x-hqdm@rpi.edu> <1991May17.131902.11332@cs.utk.edu>
Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
Lines: 66

woo@ornl.gov (John W. Wooten) writes:

>In article <_x-hqdm@rpi.edu> tomliew@aix01.aix.rpi.edu (Thomas Liew) writes:
>> Sometime ago there was some discussion on whether to indent the 
>> first paragraph immediately following a section title or header.

>My reply may be naive, but I always get an indented paragraph by the following  
>set of commands:

>\section{Section Title}
>\noindent

>Textual material that I want indented....

>I have no real idea why this works, but it does.

Very cute. \section sets up conditions so that the first
following paragraph will not be indented, and all after that
will be. Now giving \noindent followed by an empty line (which is
a \par, remember?) gives an empty paragraph (nothing to be seen),
and you next material will be indented.

Unfortunately this is all quite deplorable. The idea behind
documentstyles is that they implement a layout. If you want
a different layout you should not fiddle around but just write a
new document style, or if your change is just small, add an option.

Here is the definition of the primitive command behind sectioning.

% \@startsection {NAME}{LEVEL}{INDENT}{BEFORESKIP}{AFTERSKIP}{STYLE} 
%            optional * [ALTHEADING]{HEADING}
%    Generic command to start a section.  
%    NAME       : e.g., 'subsection'
%    LEVEL      : a number, denoting depth of section -- e.g., chapter=1,
%                 section = 2, etc.
%    INDENT     : Indentation of heading from left margin
%    BEFORESKIP : Absolute value = skip to leave above the heading.  
     ^^^^^^^^^
%                 If negative, then paragraph indent of text following 
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
%                 heading is suppressed.
                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
%    AFTERSKIP  : if positive, then skip to leave below heading, else 
%                 negative of skip to leave to right of run-in heading.
%    STYLE      : commands to set style

and here is the \section command in the 10pt style

\def\section{\@startsection {section}{1}{\z@}{-3.5ex plus -1ex minus 
 -.2ex}{2.3ex plus .2ex}{\Large\bf}}

If you change that into
\def\section{\@startsection {section}{1}{\z@}{+3.5ex plus +1ex minus 
 +.2ex}{2.3ex plus .2ex}{\Large\bf}}

the first paragraph will be indented.

Now take this definition and put it in an option file
indpar.sty and give \documentstyle[indpar]{article},
or maybe make a whole new style file.

Victor "always out to edify" Eijkhout.

(maybe I should save this msg and repost it whenever this
topic comes up. Hm. maybe I can even write a Un*x shell script
that will just go ahead and post it every two days :-)