Indent all but first lines of paragraph.

Question

Inside of a table column with a width determined by a p{5in} tag, I want all but the first line of text to be indented.

Is there any way to achieve this? Doing it by hand would make later edits overly cumbersome.

Thanks!

Answer 1

\everypar{\hangindent1em \hangafter1} seems to do what you want.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\noindent
\begin{tabular}{cp{5in}c}
X&\everypar{\hangindent1em \hangafter1} \lipsum[1-3]&X
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 2

One "pure LaTeX" way of doing this looks something like this, using a custom list environment:

\newenvironment{hanglist}[1][\parindent]{%
    \begin{list}{}{%
        \setlength{\leftmargin}{#1}
        \setlength{\labelwidth}{0pt}
        \setlength{\labelsep}{0pt}
        \setlength{\itemindent}{-#1}}
    }{%
        \end{list}
    }

\begin{hanglist}[2cm]
\item\lipsum[1]
\item\lipsum[2]
\end{hanglist}