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I am writing my Thesis report using LaTeX, I need to add indentation because every thing is right but only thing is every new paragraph is starting at initial stage but I need to add some indentation.

How do I add indentation?

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1  
LaTeX indents paragraphs by default, except after section titles. How did you configure your document? – Andrey Vihrov Feb 23 '12 at 10:03
I don't really understand what you're trying to do. Please add an example. – Thorsten Feb 23 '12 at 10:03
5  
Please add a minimum working example (MWE) that illustrates the problem you're experiencing. – Mico Feb 23 '12 at 11:24
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How are you ending your paragraphs? – egreg Feb 23 '12 at 11:35

3 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Paragraph indention is controled by the parameter \parindent. In most document classes it is set to a positive value so you should see indentations. If this is not the case you can set this parameter in the document preamble to whatever value you wish, e.g.

\setlength\parindent{24pt}

Of course, a requirement is that you mark up your paragraphs: a paragraph ends by either a blank line or by the command \par. If you instead just used \\you have directed LaTeX to start a new line but not a new paragraph.

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Thanks for your suggestion its working good. – pavani Feb 24 '12 at 9:10
Just one comment (also for @pavani). It is usually a good idea to define \parindent in terms of the type size. That way the indentation will scale if you change the size of the type. Bringhurst recommends indenting the paragraph by the same size as the type or the leading. So if you set the size using \fontsize{11pt}{13pt}\selectfont, you should use 11 or 13 pt. – Marc van Dongen Feb 21 at 19:34
up vote 2 down vote

I think you need:

\indent Here comes your text
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2  
if paragraphs are not indented by default, that means that the paragraph intention is turned to zero in the class file used. In that case \indent will add zero indentation too – Frank Mittelbach Feb 23 '12 at 11:11
Hmmm, isn't it also a possibility that the template that the OP uses does not add a \indent at the start of a paragraph? Or is setting the indent length to zero the only way of doing this? – Paul Hiemstra Feb 23 '12 at 11:18
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TeX adds an indentation box automatically on every paragraph (unless explictly directed not to), so there is no need to say \indent except in very special circumstances. There is the possibility that some environment explicitly does something like \noindent but from the little information above my guess it is a more general problem of not having any indentation. – Frank Mittelbach Feb 23 '12 at 11:29
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@PaulHiemstra: We don't know until the OP adds an MWE. Till then you are waisting your crystal ball. – Martin Schröder Feb 23 '12 at 13:01
Sorry, i just wanna say that i came to the page to make this same question and this answer was the one i was looking for :) – Dimitri Feb 26 at 23:53
up vote 1 down vote

I assume you want to add indentation after the section or subsection title as LaTeX does indentation of the other paragraphs first. The solution I used was to use a package, \usepackage{indentfirst}. You can download indentfirst.sty from the web. But there are reasons concerning proper style of why the first paragraph should not be indented.

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1.) A tip: You can use backticks ` to mark your inline code as I did in my edit. 2.) The package indentfirst is already part of all important TeX distributions or at least can be installed with the package managers, so there’s no need for downloading. – Speravir Feb 21 at 21:22

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