indent text over the full document

Question

is there a way to indent all text over the full document but not the section, subsection and subsubsection titles? i tried \setlength\parindent{20pt} but that does not take care of the text that is not in a box or minipage. Is there a name for text thats writen to the plane editor? like in:

\section{sectionone}
writen text direct to the editor...
\subsection{subsectionone}

Perhaps you're interested in indentfirst? See No indent in the first paragraph in a section? — Werner, Jan 26 '17 at 21:55
I guess the plain-TeX way of doing this may be to increase \leftskip, the glue inserted at the beginning of every line in a paragraph. (There's probably other ways, like changing where the page is and making section titles stick out into the putative left margin.) — ShreevatsaR, Jan 26 '17 at 21:59
oh, that second type of sticking the sections out in the left margin wold be interesting... — novski, Jan 26 '17 at 22:03
here are two questions that deal with similar requests: Section headings in a separate column and Formatting subsections and chapters in tufte-book. i'm sure there are more. — barbara beeton, Jan 26 '17 at 22:31
A complete example would likely get you more help. A lot depends on how the sections etc. are defined already, how the text block is set and so on. Without the detail, any suggestions are as likely to argue with your code as to cooperate with it. — cfr, Jan 26 '17 at 23:37

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 27 '17 at 00:44

I really don't recommend the following, but just posting it to give you an idea of what goes on.

To the underlying TeX typesetting engine, the page is (to a rough approximation) a bunch of paragraphs, each broken into lines according to a line-breaking algorithm (even the section header is in some sense a "paragraph"). TeX has a parameter called \leftskip which is a space ("glue") that it inserts at the beginning of each line. So you could set this to some positive parameter globally, and set it back to zero for section headers.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\leftskip=15em

\lipsum[1]

\section{\leftskip=0pt First section}
\lipsum[6-7]

\subsection{\leftskip=0pt First subsection}
\lipsum[11-12]

\end{document}

Again, I don't recommend doing the above in a real document (at minimum you probably want to change the actual definition of \section and \subsection (etc.) instead of typing \leftskip=0pt in each of them, change the margins of the document so that not so much space is wasted, etc).

Ugh. I wish someone else posted a "proper" answer instead of this one being accepted… — ShreevatsaR, Jan 27 '17 at 15:34

indent text over the full document

1 Answers1