Re: Paragraph indentation suppression

[Simon Law]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 09:02:32PM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
>             New changelog and patch.
> 
> Excellent, I installed this patch in CVS, with some changes:
> 
> 1) I changed the control words to `none' (to suppress it) and
>    `insert' (to include it), and changed the code to actually switch
>    back and forth in case someone is crazy enough to specify it twice.
>    I admit I didn't test it though :).
> 
> 2) I removed the --no-first-par-indent option that you specified.  Does
>    this really need to be controlled on the command line?  Most other
>    such options can't be.  I'll put it back if ...

        I did it since I would have an expected an option, much like
--paragraph-indent=INDENT.  (If I saw --paragraph-indent, I would have
looked for --no-first-par-indent).  This is, perhaps, because I'd want
to override the default that the author has set.

        Now that I think about it, if always suppress the first
paragraph indentation, then the option is mostly useless as I expect
most Texinfo documentation will prefer this feature, and not put a
"@firstparagraphindent insert" in.

> 3) trickiest question, about the defaults.  As I checked it in, I made
>    the strange choice to make the default for TeX be to suppress
>    indentation (as you suggested), but the default for makeinfo be to
>    include it.
>    
>    In info files, not indenting the first paragraph looks really strange
>    to me.  (Even the TeX output looks somewhat strange to me, because of
>    all the whitespace in the Texinfo layout.  Maybe I'm just not used to
>    it yet.)

        It looked strange to me for a while, but then I started flipping
through the manual, and it looked OK.  I think we're not used to it
because there's paragraph separation (with a blank line) as well as
indentation.  I now like the fact that my eye can drop right from the
title into the first word, it has a good "feel".

Simon