InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign, Fourth Edition

Chapter 9

Paragraph Indents and Spacing

Typography, like all communications media, relies on established conventions that are understood, often unconsciously, by its audience. One such convention is the chunking of our text into separate paragraphs, each of which represents a unit of thought. Although there are several ways to indicate a new paragraph, two methods are most prevalent: indenting the first line and adding spacing between paragraphs. In this chapter, I’m primarily concerned with the hows and whys of these two time-honored conventions, but I also look at the use of other types of indents for differentiating specific types of paragraphs.

First-Line Indents

The humble first-line indent plays a crucial role in the readability of documents, ...