Why isn't LaTeX indenting my paragraphs?

Question

I am trying to get latex to indent the first line of each paragraph, but whatever I try I can't seem to get it to work as I would expect reading the documentation. I expect that since I am using the article documentclass and not setting parindent to 0, that the first line of each paragraph should be indented automatically. I even tried explicitly adding a \indent to the beginning of my paragraph and still nothing (see picture below). Does anyone know what's going on here?

Here's the code that produced the above output:

\documentclass[12pt,titlepage]{article}
\usepackage{url,graphicx,tabularx,array,enumitem,multirow}
\usepackage[fleqn]{amsmath}
\usepackage[top=.8in, bottom=1.2in]{geometry}
%\setlength{\parskip}{1ex} %--skip lines between paragraphs
%\setlength{\mathindent}{0pt}

\renewcommand{\title}[1]{\raggedright{\textbf{\LARGE #1}\\}}
\renewcommand{\line}{\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{X>{\raggedleft}X}\hline\\\end{tabularx}\\[-0.5cm]}
\newcommand{\leftright}[2]{\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{X>{\raggedleft}X}#1%
& #2\\\end{tabularx}\\[-0.5cm]}

\begin{document}
\begin{titlepage}
\vspace*{8cm}
\title{EEE64: Lab 1}
\line
\leftright{\today}{\textbf{Nicholas Winterer} \\ 210001755 \\ Lab Section 04 \\ Friday 1:00 pm}
\end{titlepage}

\tableofcontents

\pagebreak

\section*{Introduction}

\indent This first lab was intented to familiarize us with the EEE64 lab equipment: the Digilent Spartan-3E development board, solderless breadboards, LEDs, SIP resistor networks, and the 7400 series of logic ICs. We learned about each of the basic logic gates (the buffer, NOT gate, AND gate, OR gate, XOR gate, NAND gate, NOR gate, and XNOR gate) and constructed a truth table for each by simulating all possible permutations of inputs in \emph{logic.ly} and recording the output. We also learned how to hook up real logic gates (in the 7400 ICs) and interface them to real hardware such as switches and LEDs. Finally, we used our breadboards to construct a circuit where we interfaced a single pair of switches to four different logic gates, each displaying its output on a seperate LED

Answer 1

The first line after the title of a sectional unit is not indented. If you want to change this behaviour, you could load the indentfirst package; i.e., write in the preamble:

\usepackage{indentfirst}

On a side note, the following line of your code

\renewcommand{\title}1{\raggedright{\textbf{\LARGE #1}\}}

will produce an error. Perhaps you meant something like

\renewcommand{\title}[1]{{\raggedright\LARGE\bfseries#1}}

Answer 2

If you want to indent the first paragraph of a specific section, the following kludge will do the job,

\makebox[0pt]{}\vspace{-2ex}

which makes an empty paragraph and then backs up over it. Ugly but effective.