How to add indent to the first line of each paragraph

[pmaevsk]

Hello, I am using templates for pdf to generate files by putting text content into them.
I want the paragraphs to have indent, like it does in Word, for example:

Basically what I use is:
self.multi_cell(width, 6, paragraph, align="J")
And result pdf look like this:

I looked docs for multi_cell method and didn't find option to add indent.
Maybe I am missing something, please, any ideas on how to achieve that.
Thanks!

[Lucas-C]

Hi @pmaevsk

Thank you for reaching out.

We do not have a "clean" way to handle paragraph indents.
@gmischler mentioned some thoughts about this in the past:

• Feature Request: Using fill with multiple columns (bg and borders for paragraphs) #1130 (comment)
• Solution needed: Typographical Margins, Line Height, Leading #1219

For now you can simply add whitespaces at the beginning of every paragraph:

from fpdf import FPDF

TEXT = "Lorem ipsum d, olor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."
INDENT = " " * 8

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.set_font("Helvetica", size=12)
pdf.multi_cell(w=pdf.epw, h=6, text=INDENT + TEXT, align="J")
pdf.output("discuss_1405.pdf")

Does that solve your problem @pmaevsk?

[pmaevsk]

Hi @Lucas-C
Thank you for your answer!

I already tried this method, and I am concerned about how defined indent looks differently for different paragraphs, possibly due to different text length and aligning with "J" method.

I mean that hence we define the indent to be 8 blank lines in result it looks like this:

At the same time, if we'll use "L" alignment:

So, I am trying to understand how the alignment works, possibly there is something that can be done in order to achieve the result I want.
Anyways, thanks for help!

[Lucas-C]

I already tried this method, and I am concerned about how defined indent looks differently for different paragraphs, possibly due to different text length and aligning with "J" method.

You are right, this won't work well with justified text 😞

It would be nice to support "proper" paragraph indents as part of fpdf2.

I just opened PR #1406 as a potential implementation for them.

You can test by installing fpdf2 from this PR branch:

pip install git+https://github.com/py-pdf/fpdf2.git@first_line_indent

[pmaevsk]

@Lucas-C Hello again!
I've implemented your solution and it works great. I haven't adjusted the styling yet, but it already looks good as it is.

Will be waiting for this PR to be merged.
Thanks for such quick responses and help! Appreciate it very much!