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Paragraph

The paragraph is the default block: ordinary body text. It has one option: the indent of its first line.

Writing

  • Enter ends the paragraph and starts a new one below.
  • Shift+Enter breaks the line inside the same paragraph.
  • Backspace in an empty paragraph deletes it.
  • / in an empty paragraph opens the menu that turns it into another block.

Each paragraph block is one LaTeX paragraph. LaTeX decides the line breaks, the hyphenation and the justification.

First-line indent

Select the paragraph and choose, in the right column:

  • Standard — LaTeX decides, as in a book. The first line is indented, with three exceptions that are part of the standard:
    • in an English document, the paragraph right after a heading starts at the margin (in a French one it is indented like the others);
    • the first line of a theorem, proof or other statement runs on from its heading;
    • a paragraph inside a column is never indented.
  • None — the first line starts at the margin, wherever the paragraph is.

The editor draws the indent exactly where the PDF prints one, and the panel says why when a Standard paragraph is not indented.

When you press Enter at the end of a paragraph set to None, the next paragraph is set to None too: the choice is made for a passage, not line by line.

What a paragraph can contain

Everything described in Writing text:

  • bold, italic, underline, strikethrough;
  • formulas inside the sentence;
  • footnotes;
  • cross-references and citations.

What it cannot do

  • No alignment setting. Text is justified.
  • The indent can be removed, not forced or resized. Standard cannot indent a paragraph where LaTeX does not (after a heading in English, in a column), and the indent has one size.
  • No document-wide setting. The indent is chosen paragraph by paragraph.
  • No spacing control. An empty paragraph prints nothing: it does not add vertical space.
  • A line break needs a line on each side. Shift+Enter at the very start of a paragraph, or at its very end, is not printed: there is no line to break.
  • No links, colours or font changes.

What it prints

A paragraph is printed as its text followed by a blank line, with special characters made safe:

The yield reached 50\% of $R_0$\footnote{Measured at 20\textdegree{}C.}.

With the indent set to None, the paragraph starts with \noindent.