paragraphsspacing
From time to time I want to insert a skip between two specific paragraphs (at the end of a thought). My first shot was to simply insert a \vspace but the indentation still bothered me.
So what I came up with in the end was a new command:
\newcommand{\parspace}{\vspace*{\baselineskip}\noindent}
With this I can add it wherever I want and have a break in the text.
However, it doesn't feel very elegant. Is there a better way to perform the same action?
As Thorsten alludes to above, the idea is to use the parskip package since it redefines list items and a couple other things to cope with the large increase in between each "paragraph". I wonder if it shouldn't redefine more, such as spacing around a figure, but I haven't investigated its limitations.
Unfortunately, the amount of space added between the paragraphs in parskip is fixed; here's how you'd change it:
\usepackage{setspace}
\doublespacing
\usepackage{parskip}
\parskip=2\baselineskip \advance\parskip by 0pt plus 2pt
The additional stretch will help to jiggle things around on the page in case you don't have an exact integer number of paragraph lines of text worth of content (e.g., there exists a table or figure on the page).
You could make the following paragraph believe that it follows a heading where there's also no indent by appending \@afterindentfalse\@afterheading after the end of the environment. Package etoolbox provides the handy \AfterEndEnvironment which makes this an easy task. \@afterheading also temporarily sets \clubpenalty to \@M (10000), though. If you don't want this after the patched environment one could insert an adapted version of \@afterheading instead.
\documentclass{article}
% environment hooks and patching:
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
% uncomment the following if you don't want \clubpenalty\@M ...
% \let\nearly@afterheading\@afterheading
% \patchcmd\nearly@afterheading
% {\@M}% original temporary setting for \clubpenalty replaced by ...
% {\@clubpenalty}% ... or whichever value you deem right
% {}{}
% ... and use \nearly@afterheading instead of \@afterheading here:
\newcommand*\NoIndentAfterEnv[1]{%
\AfterEndEnvironment{#1}{\par\@afterindentfalse\@afterheading}}
\makeatother
\NoIndentAfterEnv{itemize}
% treat other environments you want to patch accordingly
% dummy text:
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\begin{itemize}
\item foo
\item bar
\end{itemize}
\lipsum[1-2]
\end{document}
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