: Re: Why are the paragraphs of a document often indented and not vertically separated? A quick side by side comparison of two layout styles: Left: no indent and with white space; right: indented,

Print versus web.
By far the majority of print books format paragraphs by indenting, and not by inserting space between paragraphs.

The other style, with inter-paragraph spacing and no indentation, seems like a far more recent style to me, achieving popularity with the rise of the Worldwide Web.

Most of the ebooks I buy (and I buy a lot) use indentation for paragraphing. A few use inter-paragraph spacing. A few of the non-indented ones somehow lose their inter-paragraph spacing in some e-readers, which makes it very difficult to read.

Readability.
A friend recently published a book with inter-paragraph spacing, no indents, and sans-serif font. I find the thing unreadable. Perhaps much of "readability" is in what style we are used to.

For example, I had long accepted the idea that sans serif fonts are less legible than serif fonts for print. But (if I understand correctly), research does not support that conclusion. At least, not clearly.

It would be interesting to read controlled studies of these two paragraphing styles.

Printing costs.
Your example demonstrates one reason not to format paragraphs by indenting instead of inter-paragraph spacing: You can fit more words on a page. The example on the right has 26 lines, compared to 24 on the left. I haven't counted the words, but indenting that text instead of spacing between paragraphs allows 8 percent more words per page.

And those are big, blocky paragraphs. A passage with shorter paragraphs would gain even more from indenting instead of adding space.

More words per page means fewer pages per book, which saves maybe 10-20 percent of printing costs.

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