If you don't want anything indented, it is better to load parskip
. This sets the paragraph indentation to zero and marks paragraphs with increased vertical skip while maintaining the proper formatting of environments which use \parindent
, \parskip
etc.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{parskip}% if you don't want paragraphs indented but would prefer to mark them by increased vertical spacing
\title{Assignment \#1}
\author{Giri}
\date{March 20, 2014}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section*{Question 1}
\textit{Scenario containing 2 pirates :} \\*\\*
Regardless of how the gold is split, the 2nd pirate will vote against the 1st pirate and take all the gold. \\*\\*
\textit{Scenario containing 3 pirates:}
\begin{table}[ht]
\caption{3 Pirates}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c c c}
\hline\hline
Pirate\#1 & Pirate\#2 & Pirate\#3 \\
\hline
x & x & x \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
In this...
\end{document}
Alternatively, you might find it easier to use a list environment to keep formatting consistent. For example:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\newlist{pirates}{description}{1}
\setlist[pirates,1]{font=\normalfont\itshape,style=nextline,labelindent=0pt,leftmargin=0pt,itemsep=1.5em}
\title{Assignment \#1}
\author{Giri}
\date{March 20, 2014}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section*{Question 1}
\begin{pirates}
\item[Scenario containing 2 pirates:] \mbox{}\\
Regardless of how the gold is split, the 2nd pirate will vote against the 1st pirate and take all the gold.
\item[Scenario containing 3 pirates:] \mbox{}\\
\begin{table}[ht]
\caption{3 Pirates}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c c c}
\hline\hline
Pirate\#1 & Pirate\#2 & Pirate\#3 \\
\hline
x & x & x \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{pirates}
In this...
\end{document}
This basically sets up a new, specialised pirates
list formatted in a particular way. The example looks like this:
Best Answer
The class indeed sets zero parindent and a nonzero parskip. Moreover it uses
vmargin
which is known to be incompatible with some packages, notablyatbegshi
which is used by various others.I suggest you to modify it, changing lines from 66 to 89; here's the original (with line numbers for reference):
Here's the modified code
Comments
Double spacing is bad, avoid it if you can.
vmargin
is not to be used.Setting a flexible
\topskip
is a quite bad idea.The final settings of the penalty parameters may seem a good idea, but it's not. However, I didn't touch them, except adding the setting of
\@clubpenalty
, which is the real parameter in LaTeX for controlling orphan lines.\raggedbottom
in a twosided document is not recommendable.