[Tex/LaTex] Placing a fleuron in a paragraph indent without altering the spacing

indentationparagraphsspacing

I'm trying to place a fleuron at the beginning of an indented paragraph without pushing the text of the first line forward.

I want the fleuron to be flush with the left margin of the paragraph, while preserving the indentation of the first line in the paragraph.

I have no idea how to do this. If I just place the fleuron before the paragraph, I get this result as expected:

enter image description here

Here's the code that produced this image:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newcommand{\fleuron}{{\setmainfont{HoeflerText-Fleurons}1}}
\setlength{\parindent}{1cm}

\begin{document}
\fleuron \lipsum[1]
\end{document}

With the magic of MS Paint, I've illustrated exactly what I want in my document:

enter image description here

What's the best way to accomplish this?

Best Answer

You can set the fleuron as part of a zero-width box that stretches over \parindent:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[nopar]{lipsum}% Just for this example
\setlength{\parindent}{1cm}
\newcommand{\fleuron}{\textbullet}% My fleuron
\newcommand{\insertparfleuron}{\makebox[0pt][r]{\makebox[\parindent][l]{\fleuron}}}
\begin{document}
\insertparfleuron
\lipsum[1]

\lipsum[2]
\end{document}

\makebox enters TeX's horizontal mode, so necessarily starts the paragraph.

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