parindent and blockquote

Question

I am trying to typeset a paper in MLA format. Standard paragraph indent for MLA is 0.5in, and standard block quote indent is 1in with no right margin and not additional vertical space. For single paragraph block quotes, there is no additional indent, but for multiple paragraph block quotes, there is. This can be achieved pretty simply by using

\setlength{\parindent}{0.5in}
\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}  
\usepackage[vskip=0pt, leftmargin=1in, rightmargin=0in]{quoting}
\SetBlockEnvironment{quoting}

The trick is that the parindentof the block quote environment matches the global one of 0.5in, but MLA instead has block quote indentation set to 0.25in. The quotingpackage notes that it just uses the existing parindent value, but unlike other values like its margins, there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the parindent to affect just the block quote environment.

I'm very much a novice LaTeX user, and I didn't see a way to just adjust a single value within the quoting environment, is there something like, I don't know, \setlength{\quoting{\parindent}}{0.25in} that I can use to adjust values within an established environment (obviously that one doesn't work)? Or is there a better more LaTeX-y way to go about this?

Answer 1

A quick way to do it (not sure if it's the most LaTeX-y way) is to use etoolbox to insert code at the beginning of the quoting environment, and changes to lengths will stay within that scope rather than apply globally:

\setlength{\parindent}{0.5in}
\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}  
\usepackage[vskip=0pt, leftmargin=1in, rightmargin=0in]{quoting}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\AtBeginEnvironment{quoting}{\setlength{\parindent}{0.25in}}
\SetBlockEnvironment{quoting}