Unwanted right indent in document

Question

Super noob here, so please forgive any blunders! :)

My problem is that in my document (example below), the paragraph starting from the second dingbat is getting indented automatically. I don't want this; I want all the left edges aligned perfectly. How can this be done?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{pifont} %For the very nice dingbats

\begin{document}

\section*{Elementary Algebra}

\ding{234} One amusing way to look at \textbf{irrational numbers} is to say that they don't behave rationally. The point is, given their non-terminating, non-repeating decimals, there's no `sane' way to work with them!

\ding{234} Here are some elementary but easily forgotten (and highly useful) algebraic identities:

\begin{itemize}

    \item $a^3 - b^3 = (a-b)(a^2+ab+b^2)$

\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Answer 1

Either add \noindent before each \ding{234} (except the first: that would be useless), or set \parindent=0pt in your preamble – but you then should fix \parskip to a non zero value (say \smallskipamount for instance) so as to differentiate paragraphs.

You also could consider these paragraphs as items in a (1st level) itemize environment, load the enumitempackage and write:

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{amsmath}
    \usepackage{enumitem}
    \usepackage{pifont} %For the very nice dingbats

    \begin{document}

    \section*{Elementary Algebra}
    \begin{itemize}[label = \ding{234},wide, labelindent = 0pt]

    \item One amusing way to look at \textbf{irrational numbers} is to say that they don't behave rationally. The point is, given their non-terminating, non-repeating decimals, there's no `sane' way to work with them!

    \item Here are some elementary but easily forgotten (and highly useful) algebraic identities:

    \begin{itemize}[label = \textbullet, align = left,  labelindent = 1.5em, labelsep* = 0.5em,labelwidth = 1em,  leftmargin =! ,topsep = 0pt]
        \item $a^3 - b^3 = (a-b)(a^2+ab+b^2)$ 
        \item $a^3  +  b^3 = (a + b)(a^2-ab+b^2)$
    \end{itemize}

    \end{itemize}

    \end{document}