Automaticaly add paragraph spacing only between two textual paragraphs

Question

I can use:

\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

But this messes up the rest of the document as it also increases the spacing after chapters, sections, sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections. As well as this it increases the white space between text and equations, equations and other equations, figures, tables, and lists etc.

I only want it to add white space between two text paragraphs, so the spacing between text and equations etc stays at the default size.

The way I have been doing this so far is to manually add:

\\

After each paragraph. This does exactly what I want, but since the project I'm working on is a large collaborative project this is undesirable as someone is likely to forget.

I'd also ideally like to do this without having to put all text inside a custom \begin{myParagraph} environment for the same reasons.

Is there something I can put in my header.tex file to sort all of this out automatically?

Answer 1

The parskip package aims to allow setting for a non zero \parskip with the standard classes while reducing the number of places unwanted space appears. Alternatively more extensive classes such as the koma classes have design options incorporating non zero parskip.

\documentclass[parskip=half]...

for example.

Using \\ at the end of a paragraph does not add vertical space, it forces a spurious extra line of the paragraph that is an empty box the width of the page (which is why you get an underfull box warning). Such boxes to not act well at page breaks (or anywhere else).