Re: Newbie: Question on Tutorial

[Stefano Franchi]

That's true. And it's also true that, as all matters of style and 
practice, paragraph separation is culture-relative. The style you 
mentioned, for example, is actually quite common in the sciences and 
technical literature. Many O' Reilly books, for example, are typeset 
that way. Italian books, instead, tend to follow the "American high 
school" style, in spite of the fact that Italian student are never 
taught anything about it in school, while  French books follow the 
convention adopted by most LaTeX/LyX classes, etc. Typography is a 
rather contentious field and it's better to leave these choices to the 
publishing house's book designer who, one hopes, will design a 
consistent layout for the book (or journal, whatever) as a whole, 
including paragraph separation.

This is fact the source of my main--and only-- gripe about LaTex/LyX: 
it assumes that there will not be a human typesetter/book designer at 
the receiving end, and thus it does not provide for an easy way to 
export the output to a human typesetter. Since most publishers (indeed 
I believe all) in the Humanities will not accept LaTeX, one is forced 
to rely on time-consuming and error-prone third-party conversions to 
Word or RTF. What I would need (and, I bet, many other professional 
writers in the humanities, aka as professors) is basic, fast, 
translator to Word or Rtf that preserves only the minimal formatting 
you can see on the LyX screen, plus the footnotes and biblio. I have no 
doubts that when LyX gets there it will become the preferred 
alternative to commercial word processors for even the least 
technically savvy humanities people.

But I'm digressing...
Cheers,
Stefano
On Sep 18, 2004, at 2:43 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Stefano Franchi wrote:
As it is said somewhere in the tutorial, it is standard typesetting
practice not to indent the first line of a paragraph immediately 
following
a section heading. All paragraphs following regular paragraphs should 
be
indented. This is good typesetting practice, and most classes 
implement
this behavior. It is true, though, that it does conflict with what 
most
students in American high schools are taught--namely, to indent each 
and
every paragraph. Pick up a book published by good publishing houses to
find out who is right.
Stefano,
  You are, of course, absolutely correct. However, for those who 
tremble at
the sight of a non-indented first paragraph after a section heading,
followed by indented paragraphs, there's a option. In the layout 
dialog box
(I believe that's where it is) the writer can elect to separate 
paragraphs
with an extra line.

  In this case all paragraphs are fully justified with no indentation 
and
they look like the block style of business letters.

Rich
--
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>
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Stefano Franchi
Department of Philosophy                  Ph:  (64) 9 373-7599 x83940
University Of Auckland                  Fax: (64) 9 373-7408
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