Is there an easy way to have my whole document with a space between paragraphs rather than indentation?

Question

I would like to have my whole document showing a blank line (or space) between paragraphs and no indentation. I know how to do it line by line, but is there a way to change that with just one or a few lines at the beginning of the document? Like a package you can install, or a new command?

Answer 1

Adding

\usepackage{parskip}

to the preamble of your document (the part between \documentclass{...} and \begin{document} will set the paragraphs to have no indentation and a bit of space between them.

Note that this isn't a complete solution, because there may be elements in your document that you don't want this format to apply to (footnotes, for example). A proper solution would involve (effectively) writing a new document class.

You can read a bit about how the parskip package works by looking at the comments in parskip.sty itself.

Answer 2

You can use

\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}

in your preamble if you're not using any other fancy (or not so fancy) formatting such as tables, etc. Apparently the package parskip fixes most of the issues that this setup can cause if you do have more complicated formats within your document. I've never used that package myself, though, so I can't speak from personal experience.

Answer 3

To change the amount of space between paragraphs, you want to change \parskip

\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}

Will add an extra line between paragraphs.

\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

will remove the indent at the start of paragraphs.

Answer 4

Some classes support switching to vertical space between paragraphs instead of indent paragraphs. For example all KOMA-Script classes support option parskip with several values:

\documentclass[parskip=false]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{parskip=false}
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=full}\KOMAoptions{parskip=full}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=full-}\KOMAoptions{parskip=full-}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=full+}\KOMAoptions{parskip=full+}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=full*}\KOMAoptions{parskip=full*}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=half}\KOMAoptions{parskip=half}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=half-}\KOMAoptions{parskip=half-}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=half+}\KOMAoptions{parskip=half+}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]

\section{parskip=half*}\KOMAoptions{parskip=half*}\selectfont
\lipsum[1-2]
\end{document}

Values full and half distinguish in the amount of space between the paragraphs. The postfixes influence the minimum amount of free horizontal space at the last line of a paragraph.