am writing a thesis report using LaTeX and I need to add indentations because every new paragraph starts from the initial position on the left.
How do I add indentations?
LaTeX indents paragraphs by default, except after section titles. How did you configure your document? – Andrey VihrovFeb 23 ’12 at 10:03
2 I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do. Please add an example. – ThorstenFeb 23 ’12 at 10:03
9 Please add a minimum working example (MWE) that illustrates the problem you’re experiencing. – MicoFeb 23 ’12 at 11:24
3 How are you ending your paragraphs? – egregFeb 23 ’12 at 11:35
Paragraph indention is controled by the parameter \parindent. In most document classes it is set to a positive value so you should see indentations. If this is not the case you can set this parameter in the document preamble to whatever value you wish, e.g.
\setlength\parindent{24pt}
Of course, a requirement is that you mark up your paragraphs: a paragraph ends by either a blank line or by the command \par. If you instead just used \\you have directed LaTeX to start a new line but not a new paragraph.
Just one comment (also for @pavani). It is usually a good idea to define \parindent in terms of the type size. That way the indentation will scale if you change the size of the type. Bringhurst recommends indenting the paragraph by the same size as the type or the leading. So if you set the size using \fontsize{11pt}{13pt}\selectfont, you should use 11 or 13 pt. – user10274 Feb 21 ’13 at 19:34
1 em is another common length to use. Although I have noticed that a lot of american english texts seem to have a bigger indentation. It all varies… 🙂 – jonalv Mar 3 ’14 at 14:46