[Tex/LaTex] Automatically add vertical space /only/ between two sequential paragraphs

paragraphsparskipsectioningspacing

I am using KOMA-script scrreprt class.

I know I can use \usepackage{parskip} or \setlength{\parskip}{12pt}, but both of these also affect headings.

Adding \vspace{12pt} manually between all two sequential paragraphs seems to work, but that's anything but convenient. Is there a way to automate it?

Best Answer

If you use a KOMA-Script class, the solution is already provided by the class itself:

\documentclass[parskip=full]{scrreprt}

(page 49 in the English documentation).

You can also add

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\appto\chapterheadendvskip{\vspace{-1\parskip}}

if you don't want a \parskip added immediately after a chapter title.

For section titles use titlesec. For customizing the amount of the \parskip, use something like

\setparsizes{\parindent}{50pt plus 20pt minus 30pt}{\parfillskip}

in your preamble (adjusting the ridiculous values I put just as an example). It's important to provide stretching and shrinking components to help text fit in the page.

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[Tex/LaTex] biblatex/multicol: Incorrect vertical space after bibliography heading

Apart from following the good advice by henrique, you can say

\begingroup\setlength{\multicolsep}{0pt}
\begin{multicols}{2}[{\printbibheading[title={Second Bibliography}]}]
\printbibliography[heading=none]
\end{multicols}\endgroup

or, probably, define a personal command:

\newcommand\twocolprintbibliography[2][0pt]{%
  \begingroup\setlength{\multicolsep}{#1}%
  \begin{multicols}{2}[{\printbibheading[title={#2}]}]
  \printbibliography[heading=none]
  \end{multicols}\endgroup}

and call it as

\twocolprintbibliography{Second Bibliography}
\twocolprintbibliography[3pt]{Second Bibliography}

which provides for a much clearer input. The optional argument is to fine tune the spacing in case of need.

[Tex/LaTex] Random unwanted space between paragraphs

I ran your code. (By the way, your not-so-minimal example doesn't compile unless the natbib and pagenote packages are loaded as well.) At least in the example you provide, there's indeed a problem of "overstretched inter-paragraph glue", confirming @Marco's guess. I can think of three solutions to this problem:

You could issue the following command in your document's preamble:

\raggedbottom

This will let the height of the textblock vary from page to page. If your document is going to be typeset two-sided (aka bookstyle) with facing pages, the result may look poor from a typographic perspective.
A more elegant solution (from a typographic perspective) consists of inserting the command

\usepackage[bottom]{footmisc}

(also in the preamble). Doing so will insert additional whitespace between the main text and the footnote rule rather than over-stretching the inter-paragraph glue. Of course, if a given page doesn't have any footnotes and features a single paragraph break, this approach won't help.
A third and, in my view at least, even better solution would be to break up the text into more but shorter paragraphs. Doing so would increase the text's intelligibility and lessen the risk of an occurrence of the problem you describe.

The example code you provide has an entire page consisting of only two, extremely long paragraphs, plus a rather long footnote. If you were to break up each of these two long paragraphs into two -- better yet, three -- shorter paragraphs, LaTeX would have many more degrees of freedom to play with while building up the page, thereby much reducing the likelihood that LaTeX will have to resort to over-stretching the inter-paragraph glue.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] biblatex/multicol: Incorrect vertical space after bibliography heading

[Tex/LaTex] Random unwanted space between paragraphs

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