Indentation (typography)

In typography, an indentation refers to a space at the beginning of the first line of a paragraph .

Indentations are particularly popular when typesetting large texts (such as in books) to structure texts. The eye can thus easily see the paragraphs without interrupting the reading flow, as is the case with blank lines.

The size of the indentation depends on the font size and sentence width; In the Werksatz, two quarters used to be the largest permissible indentation. A square is common today. The exit , that is the name of the incomplete last line of a paragraph, should cover the indentation , that is, it should always “run” further than the following indentation.

There are different indentation procedures for the first paragraph under a heading. In America, it should often be omitted because no additional separating function is required here. In classic German (European) typesetting, all paragraphs used to be indented uniformly, which is no longer common in modern book production. Nowadays, only paragraphs following paragraphs are usually indented. The first paragraph after a heading, after a blank line or other insertions - such as longer quotations, figures, tables, lists and the like - starts bluntly (i.e. without indentation). For further details see paragraph .

With the hanging indentation , the first line of a paragraph is set to the full width, while all other lines are indented - the first line "hangs" out of the column margin to the left.

Digital texts and the internet

CSS gives

p { text-indent: 1.5em }

an easy way to define indentation.

In order to only indent paragraphs that follow other paragraphs (i.e. not after headings, lists, figures etc.), the "successor" selector +("adjacent") can be used with CSS.2 :

p+p { text-indent: 1.5em }

If the page is not designed as a web text with very short paragraphs, but rather, for example, fiction literature with long paragraphs, it is now advisable to return to the classic arrangement for these types of text, as legibility is improved.