[Tex/LaTex] Left-align entire document

horizontal alignment

I'd like to left align my entire document (latex default seems to be center justified). Is there a simple way to do this?

I'm trying to use 

\begin{flushleft}
...
\end{flushleft}

but really don't want to have to do that on a paragraph by paragraph basis (and when I try to simply add that to the start and end of my document I get an error.

Best Answer

Just use: 

\raggedright

right after \begin{document}

The flushleft environment effectively sets text in a ragged right list environment. It is defined as:

\def\flushleft{\trivlist \raggedright\item\relax} 
\def\endflushleft{\endtrivlist}

The \raggedright command does the actual work:

\def\raggedright{%
   \let\\\@centercr\@rightskip\@flushglue \rightskip\@rightskip
   \leftskip\z@skip
   \parindent\z@}

Setting text this way will lead to some ugly looking lines. The ragged2e package provides the \RaggedRight command (and corresponding) FlushLeft environment that solves some of these problems. I would recommend using it instead of just \raggedright.

To see the differences between \raggedright and \RaggedRight here's a small sample document:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{hyphenat}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}[t]{.4\textwidth}
\textbf{raggedright with no hyphenation}\par
\raggedright
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}[t]{.4\textwidth}
\textbf{RaggedRight with hyphenation}\par
\RaggedRight
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

output of code

Both \raggedright and \RaggedRight set the paragraph indent to zero. With ragged2e this is controllable with the length \RaggedRightParindent which can be set to equal the regular \parindent in the following way:

\setlength{\RaggedRightParindent}{\parindent}

To do this with regular \raggedright you could do the following:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\newlength{\rrindent}
\setlength{\rrindent}{\parindent}
\apptocmd{\raggedright}{\setlength{\parindent}{\rrindent}}{}{}
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