The modern paragraph indent is actually a “mistake” left behind by printing press deadlines. Far from being a deliberate design choice, the white space we use to separate ideas today is a typographic ghost—an empty slot originally reserved for elaborate, colorful symbols that printers simply didn’t have time to complete. The Evolution: From Unbroken Text to Missing Icons
To understand how the indent became our standard visual guide, it helps to track how text evolved from dense blocks to readable pages:
The pilcrow’s strange typographic history | by Marcin Wichary
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