If you're like me, you'd like your posted fic to look as much like published fiction as possible. Of course, that means indenting the first line of most paragraphs.

So not:

Their professor sat at the edge of his desk; his gentle eyes surveyed the room before returning their attention back upon Rose.

Professor Longbottom wasn’t the resident TILTS (Teacher I’d Love To Snog) — that honour went to the O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.-level Divination teacher, Professor Asunción Pereira Oliveira da Silva from Portugal — but Albus didn’t understand why not, especially when Neville was framed as he was now: eyes twinkling, hair a sparkling deep chocolate with the faintest hint of red; and forearms — dear Merlin, those forearms! — and, connected to them, biceps; and connected to them, shoulders.

Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

But:

Their professor sat at the edge of his desk; his gentle eyes surveyed the room before returning their attention back upon Rose.

Professor Longbottom wasn’t the resident TILTS (Teacher I’d Love To Snog) — that honour went to the O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.-level Divination teacher, Professor Asunción Pereira Oliveira da Silva from Portugal — but Albus didn’t understand why not, especially when Neville was framed as he was now: eyes twinkling, hair a sparkling deep chocolate with the faintest hint of red; and forearms — dear Merlin, those forearms! — and, connected to them, biceps; and connected to them, shoulders.

Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

So... how can we do it?

Most people do the non-breaking space hack. They copy and paste this code five-to-six times, depending on how much of an indent they want:  . So they're bloated mark-up looks like this:

       Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

which would give you the same effect as:

      Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

It looks the same to the end-user (the reader), but who wants to deal with paragraphs and paragraphs of text littered with  ...?!?! Not me.

Here's a simpler way to do it.

<p style="text-indent: 30px;">Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?</p>

That produces:

Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

Now, you can do this really quickly by making sure your paragraphs all have the <p> tags on them, then you can do a simple FIND & REPLACE with Word -- or whatever word processing program you use -- and replace all of the <p> tags with <p style="text-indent: 30px;"> tags.

But wait!

There's an even easier way!

Make sure all of your paragraphs have the <p> tag.

At the beginning of the story, after all of your heading information (author, title, warnings, etc.), type this:

<div style="text-indent: 30px">

Then paste in your story, making sure that the <p> tags are at the beginning of every paragraph that you want to indent.

At the end of the story -- no matter how long it is -- type in: </div>, which is a 'closing tag'.
Explanation: The P tag is a CHILD of the the DIV tag. The DIV tag wraps around the story like a loving mother hugging her child. And, like a child would inherit some things from its mother, so too will the P tag inherit some things from its mother. Fortunately, the text-indent is one of the things the P tag can inherit! So every P tag wrapped in the loving embrace of its <div style="text-indent: 30px"> </div > mother, will inherit the indention.

Don't believe me?

Their professor sat at the edge of his desk; his gentle eyes surveyed the room before returning their attention back upon Rose.

Professor Longbottom wasn’t the resident TILTS (Teacher I’d Love To Snog) — that honour went to the O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.-level Divination teacher, Professor Asunción Pereira Oliveira da Silva from Portugal — but Albus didn’t understand why not, especially when Neville was framed as he was now: eyes twinkling, hair a sparkling deep chocolate with the faintest hint of red; and forearms — dear Merlin, those forearms! — and, connected to them, biceps; and connected to them, shoulders.

Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?

Voila!

I just did it.

And it just worked. This is all I typed.

<div style="text-indent: 30px"><p>Their professor sat at the edge of his desk; his gentle eyes surveyed the room before returning their attention back upon Rose.</p><p>Professor Longbottom wasn’t the resident TILTS (Teacher I’d Love To Snog) — that honour went to the O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.-level Divination teacher, Professor Asunción Pereira Oliveira da Silva from Portugal — but Albus didn’t understand why not, especially when Neville was framed as he was now: eyes twinkling, hair a sparkling deep chocolate with the faintest hint of red; and forearms — dear Merlin, those forearms! — and, connected to them, biceps; and connected to them, shoulders.</p><p>Who would have ever thought that gardening could be so good for one’s health?</p></div>

There's an even easier method for doing this, but it involves going into your Edit Journal Customizations and mucking about in the CSS code [which isn't that difficult, really], but some people may feel a bit leery of playing with it. If you want, however, I can show you how. It really is easier than it sounds!

Hope this helps some folks!