line-breakingparagraphsspacing
I usually use \\, \par, \newline, etc. to add whitespace to LaTeX. However, when I use raggedRight, the pdflatex spits out a ton of messages saying "There's no line here to end." Ultimately, all vertical whitespace is removed.
My question is, is it possible to add whitespace to a raggedRight environment? If so, how? If not, what can I use to successfully justify my text to the left and maintain the whitespace as it is?
\everypar can help, but be careful: some LaTeX macros redefine it.
However, this works:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\newcounter{par}
\newenvironment{numberedpars}{\setcounter{par}{0}%
\everypar={\refstepcounter{par}%
\makebox[0pt]{\makebox[15ex][l]{\arabic{par}}}}}{}
\begin{document}
\begin{numberedpars}
\lipsum[1-4]
\end{numberedpars}
\end{document}
Since this uses \refstepcounter, you can use \label and \ref mechanism to reference your paragraphs.
Notwithstanding, that this is not the type of paragraph formatting that one would recommend for modern typesetting, the approach you can take is what you suggested; that is to manually insert pilcrows into the text rather than using newlines.
As you seem to require the quick changing between various different formats, I would suggest you create a macro to switch on-off the effects of the Pilcrow macro:
\let\cacheP\P
\def\Poff{\def\P{\leavevmode\par}}
\def\Pon{\let\P\cacheP}
In the mark-up, you can use \Pon and \Poff, as required. Here is the MWE:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\let\cacheP\P
\def\Poff{\def\P{\leavevmode\par}}
\def\Pon{\let\P\cacheP}
\begin{document}
This is a short paragraph. \P This is another and this is another.
\P And another.
And this is a normal one.\lipsum*[1]
This is how you negate the effect.
\Poff
This is a short paragraph.
\P This is another and this is another.
\P and another.
\Pon
This is a short paragraph.
\P This is another and this is another.
\P and another.
\end{document}
Best Answer
Instead of using
\\\\, I found that using\smallskip,\medskip,\bigskip, and other commands from Lengths and when to use them works well. Along with David Carlisle's suggestion of using the optional length parameter after\\to specify a length of vertical white-space.