One infuriating random line break.

dr gonzo

Im currently putting together a latex document which, since Im new to this, Im using a template for. So far the whole thing looks pretty much as I want it to, except for a single maddening linebreak between two paragraphs that I cannot figure out. The way the template is set up (Im assuming) the standard paragraph break is a new line plus indentation, and everywhere else in the document that is working perfectly. In this one place however its a blank line before indenting the new paragraph. Its obviously therefore recognising that a new paragraph is starting but in just this one location adds in a blank line for no reason!

Can anybody help me with this? Im really falling behind with this work because of the amount of tinkering Ive had to do.

Cheers all!

EDIT: I should have mentioned that I am copying and pasting text from Word. Could it possibly be carrying over markup or something? I really am quite clueless about all of this.

djpbarry

Can we see some examples from your .tex file?

Turtwig

As a golden rule the idea of LaTeX is to avoid tinkering. You should let it decide for you what's best. Understandably it takes some getting used to. We can't really help you though unless you post snippets of .tex file.
Some questions:
Are you writing an article, report, letter etc.?
Are you using any formatting packages?
Have you explicitly forced a paragraph anywhere to be of a certain format?

There really are loads of questions we could ask.

dr gonzo

Apologies folks for the delay folks, Im in a bit of a quandry. I would love for you guys to look over the tex file but unfortunately its not my own work I'm putting together and therefore cannot be posted up here. I understand completely that you cant really do much unless you can see it. This is quite annoying. I had thought that latex was plain text and therefore nothing should really carry over but thats clearly wrong. Im showing my newbie status here! If you guys can think of anything that could help that I could post that isnt the writing itself I will throw it up immediately.

EDIT: Hello again all, I have contrived a seriously sloppy solution in case anyone is interested, or indeed has a similar issue. As I was saying, for whatever reason copy-pasting from word would, in some cases, randomly add in a random number of line breaks at the start of some new paragraphs. This could be one new line or three. Basically I've just had to force the correction by removing the break and then adding back in the new paragraph and indent. So where these troublesome breaks are happening I am adding in "\nolinebreak \\ \indent".

As I said, really sloppy, but I'm not scrabbling in the dark anymore!

djpbarry

dr gonzo wrote: »

I had thought that latex was plain text and therefore nothing should really carry over but thats clearly wrong.

A tex file is nothing more than a plain text file. In theory, you should be able to save a word document as a plain text file and then run latex on it without any problems.