ubuntu-developer-manual team mailing list archive

[Kyle Nitzsche <kyle.nitzsche@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/13/2011 11:43 AM, Kevin Godby wrote:
> 'allo.
>
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:09 AM, Kyle Nitzsche
> <kyle.nitzsche@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > It appears that first lines of paragraphs are indented unless they are the
> > first line of a chapter or section.
> Yep. This is the correct way to handle paragraph indentation.  (I
> could quote references such as The Chicago Manual of Style and some
> design books, but you didn't seem impressed by that last time. :-))
Right, design is mutable and subjective.
> > This causes odd layout sometimes, for example when you start a section with
> > two or more paragraphs all of which are short enough to be only on one line.
> >   * The first line is *not* indented
> >   * The second *is* indented
> >   * The third *is* indented
> >
> > See attached image. The content is three one line paragraphs. Result: first
> > is not indented. Rest Are.
> >
> > This is confusing I think, because the reader can't easily understand what
> > is and is not a new paragraph.
> I think this exemplifies poor writing and not poor design.  Those
> three sentences should belong to the same paragraph.  One-sentence
> paragraphs should be fairly rare.
I won't touch this one ;)
> > One solution may be to never indent the first line of a paragraph. My
> > (subjective) design opinion is that this is a cleaner and more modern visual
> > look, and it avoids this kind of issue.
> This is something I've been considering.  Since we're inserting so
> many blocks of code and other display material, it leads to many
> instances of a single line of text introducing the display material
> making up the paragraph.  I'll work on the implementation a bit later
> today so we can see what it looks like.  (One slight downside is that
> it'll increase the length of the book a bit, but I don't think we're
> too concerned about page count—correct me if I'm wrong.)
Great. Thanks.
> --Kevin