Re: indents and noindents and environments

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:40 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> But for @indent, the situation is different.  There's the obvious use of
> @indent after a section heading.  That's fine.  But @indent could also
> be useful inside environments, which (as noted) have no paragraph
> indentation by default.
>
> Right now, in TeX:
> - in the line-for-line environments (@display, @example, etc.), @indent
> will insert a paragraph indentation.
> - In the filled environments (@quotation, @indentedblock) it has no
> effect.  I think I should change that to be the same as the
> @example-like environments.  It does not seem unreasonable to me to want
> quotations to have paragraph indentation, sometimes.
>
> In HTML: using @indent is a no-op.  It has no effect after a section
> heading and no effect inside any environments, as far as I can see.  I
> think this is fine for HTML, since HTML does not have (any) paragraph
> indentation in general, by design.

@indent within @example doesn't seem very useful. It would be possible
for some lines of, e.g., sample program output to be indented, but
that would be better done with leading spaces. However, if it is
encouraged to use @indent for this purpose, then it should show up in
the HTML output as well, because otherwise it is missing information.
An option is to allow it for consistency with the other block
contexts, but not to advertise it very much.

I can't imagine any problems with ignoring @indent in the HTML output
for the other commands. If any examples come to light where it would
be useful it could always be added later with CSS or something.

I notice that @exdent works in block environments so it would be
consistent for @indent to work too.

Reading through the Texinfo manual I'm not sure what the difference is
between @format and @flushleft, but based on the command names it
wouldn't make sense for @indent to appear in a @flushleft block.

> In Info: @indent after a section heading does indent the paragraph,
> which is good, since Info has paragraph indentation.  However, the
> special case of @indent inside environments does not happen.  (We
> probably never discussed it.)  Seems like in principle that should be
> changed to match TeX?  Not that anyone's holding their breath for it.

It seems harmless to allow it as a stylistic choice.