LaTeX: Add Paragraph and Line Spacing

The default report document generated by LaTeX is good. However, it looks a bit compact with not much space between lines and paragraphs. You might want to make it more readable by adding some spacing between lines and some spacing between paragraphs.

You can do so with the following lines of code in your LaTeX code’s preamble:


\parskip 1.5ex % paragraph spacing
\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.33} % line spacing

Alternatively, you can also use setspace package to set space between lines and paragraphs.


\usepackage{setspace}
\onehalfspacing % line spacing (is equal to baselinestretch 1.33)

One more thing: You might have noticed that in the default LaTeX report document, there is an indentation of a tab from the second paragraph of a chapter or section. You might want to switch off this feature so that all paragraphs align equally without any indentation.

You can do so by writing the following line of code in your LaTeX code’s preamble:


\parindent 0pt

Here is the full code for line spacing and paragraph spacing. I have used setspace package along with parskip.


\documentclass{report}

\usepackage{lipsum}  

\usepackage{setspace}

\parindent 0pt
\parskip 1.5ex
%\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.33}
\onehalfspacing

\begin{document}

\chapter{Introduction}
\lipsum[2]

% double spacing between lines
\begin{doublespacing}
\lipsum[3]
\end{doublespacing}

\end{document}

Here is the output of the above code:

Here is the default output without line and paragraph spacing:

Hope this helps. Thanks.