How can I indent a block of text for a specified amount? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Indenting a whole paragraph
Write text with some fixed amount of space from the margin

I would like to indent a paragraph or two for a specific amount.

The quote environment is not suitable, since indentation width is not configurable.

An article suggested using {\addtolength{\leftskip}{5mm} text}, but that doesn't work for me.

Another article suggested a very hacky way, which involved temporarily modifying global margins.

Is there a clean solution for this?

EDIT:

Thanks to a comment by @barbara beeton, addtolength can be made to work by adding a \par: {\addtolength{\leftskip}{5mm} text \par}

Answer 1

You may use addmargin environment of either a KOMA-Script class or the KOMA-Script package scrextend. Here an example with a standard class and package scrextend:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scrextend}
\usepackage{lipsum}% for demo only!
\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]
\begin{addmargin}[1em]{2em}% 1em left, 2em right
\lipsum[2]
\end{addmargin}
\lipsum[3]
\end{document}

Results in:

Answer 2

I solved the problem with a fairly clean solution, which makes use of the tabular environment:

\begin{tabular}{@{\hspace{3ex}}p{42em}}
text
\end{tabular}

With this solution, you have to manually set the indentation width (3ex in the example) and the width of the paragraph (42em in the example).

Answer 3

You can temporarily modify the indentation on the left side for a complete paragraph with the \hangindent length parameter and the \hangafter macro.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
  \lipsum[1]

  \hangindent2em
  \hangafter=0
  \lipsum[2]

  \lipsum[3]
\end{document}