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### 15.3 \parindent & \parskip

Synopsis:

\setlength{\parskip}{horizontal len}
\setlength{\parinden}{vertical len}


Both are a rubber lengths (see Lengths). They give the indentation of ordinary paragraphs, not paragraphs inside minipages (see minipage), and the vertical space between paragraphs.

This, put in the preamble,

\setlength{\parindent}{0em}
\setlength{\parskip}{1ex}


arranges that the document will have paragraphs that are not indented, but instead are vertically separated by about the height of a lowercase ‘x’.

In standard LaTeX documents, the default value for \parindent in one-column documents is 15pt when the default text size is 10pt, 17pt for 11pt, and 1.5em for 12pt. In two-column documents it is 1em. (These values are set before LaTeX calls \normalfont so em is derived from the default font, Computer Modern. If you use a different font then to set \parindent in units matching that font, do \AtBeginDocument{\setlength{\parindent}{1em}}.) The default value for \parskip in LaTeX’s standard document styles is 0pt plus1pt.