It's customary in typesetting to indent the start of a paragraph. This tradition stems from an ancient markup scheme that used a sign similar to '�' to indicate a paragraph break. Early books did not have paragraphs as we know them nowadays; the text was written continously, except for a break at a major division. Scribes used a sign that later became the '�' sign to mark paragraph breaks. First make a line break before the '�' to emphasize the paragraph break, and then remove the '�' because you no longer really need it, voila, you have the indented first line.
Except we don't want to indent the first line after a heading or after a thematic break in the body text (and, according to some traditions, the first line in a column should never be indented either). Now the first <para> (or similar body text block) in a <section> (or similar structural division) is easy to catch, but how about the anonymous thematical subdivision of the body text within a <section>? I've tried to find something obviously suitable in DocBook without luck; so far I have been able to come up with the following not-really-obvious hacks: - use an empty <bridgehead /> between anonymous subsections - set some attribute on the first <para> (or similar block element) in an anonymous subsections - use sets of PIs to wrap anonymous subsections, like <?xx tag block?> .. <?xx tag /block?> - use a PI like <?xx newpara?> within a <para> I consider only the first one (use empty <bridgehead />) to have some lasting value, so I hope that I have overlooked better ideas. Any suggestions? Kind regards, Peter Ring
