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Typesetting question:

I've noticed that in many novels there will be a scene change within a chapter that is marked by a larger than normal gap between two paragraphs. Is there a way to represent this in a #LaTeX document?

#latex
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Matthew Skala
Matthew Skala
• •
if you just want to create a space, \vspace . There are more complicated things you can do if you want it to have some kind of semantic status, consistent style, add asterisks (which helps solve the "what if it's at the end of a page?" issue) and so on, all the way up to complete document classes meant for fiction.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Marei
Marei
• •

@mattskala It would be better to wrap that into a specific command. So you can adjust the amount later globally instead of locally having it hardcoded. To give an example:

\NewDocumentCommand{\chapterSep}{\par\vspace{1em}\AddToHookNext{para/begin}{\OmitIndent}}

The \OmitIndent thing would make it flexible so you also use it with documents where you have indentation of the first line instead of a parskip.

#TeXLaTeX

#texlatex @Matthew Skala
in reply to Marei

Matthew Skala
Matthew Skala
• •
@TeXhackse Are those LaTeX internal macros? I'm not familiar with \OmitIndent and would have been inclined to use \noindent (as well as, for instance, \newcommand) if not going all the way to using something like the memoir class which has relevant features already built in.
@Marei
in reply to Matthew Skala

Marei
Marei
• •

@mattskala not internal,, as they are user level commands. But yes, it's part of #TeLaTeX without any package

NewDocumentCommand is the modern replacement of newcommand. (see `texdoc usrguide`)

The hook with OmitIndent allows to set the \noindent for the following paragraph, while \noindent has to be called at the beginning of that paragraph.(`texdoc ltpara-doc¸`)

Online links of the documentation:
texdoc.org/serve/usrguide/0
texdoc.org/serve/ltpara-doc/0

#telatex @Matthew Skala
in reply to Marei

Marei
Marei
• •

@mattskala Oh and I of course I agree there are document class which support that by default. Just sometimes one may not use those or can't or whatever. So I wanted to provide a general option. Of course you should check the documentation of the document class first.

memoir's plainbreak is defined similar. But what I don't like about it, that it does not have a default value for the size. So I'd still define my own \chapterSep to be like \plainbreak{1} to be able to adjust that globally.

@Matthew Skala

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