🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bawc;u@cs.psu.edu> deng@shire.cs.psu.edu (Mingqi Deng) writes:
>I was a troff user with -me macro, but switched to LaTeX for its
>portability and publicity. While using LaTeX, I could not figure out
>how to do the equilance of the two very handy features of troff: ".in" 
>(possibly nested) and ".ti" (eg. ".ti -.3i").

>So, my problems are 

>1. How to adjust left indentation of a line, a paragraph or a
>   section at demand, while still having LaTeX do paragraph formating, 
>   etc.? (I tried \parbox, but it can not produce the right page-break
>   since the text in a box is considered a big character. Also tried is
>   the list environment, but that gives me no control over the width of
>   the indentation, and nested lists did not seem to work either).

First of all, one thing that's very important to remember about LaTeX
(which far too many people forget) is that you aren't telling LaTeX
how things look, but rather what they are. Now, if you wanted to have
a passage indented, ask yourself "what is this?" If it's a quotation,
use the quote or quotation environment. It is possible to do what you
want to do using the trivlist environment, but I recommend that you
just use quote and quotation (quote, incidentally, despite the _bad_
examples that appear in the LaTeX manual, is intended for very
short quotations of one or two lines where the paragraph indentation
would look out of place. Compare
       Having something indented like this
to the result of quote
    Having something indented like this
to a quotation that is fairly sizable:
       This quotation is long enough that we have more than
    one line of text, so the paragtaph indentation looks a 
    little more natural.
Boy, this is a long parenthetical comment).

If you really don't like the way quotation and quote work (e.g.,
you feel that the indentation at the right should be different,
then look at the definitions of quotation and quote in the .doc
file and place modified versions in the preamble of your document).

-dh
-- 
"Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
   nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior"          -Catullus
D.A. Hosek.                        UUCP: uunet!jarthur!dhosek
                               Internet: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu