First-line paragraph indenting in PDFs using R Markdown

Question

I'm hoping this is a question with a simple answer. I am using Rmarkdown/knitr to author a PDF document (in RStudio). Many LaTeX classes (like article) automatically indent the first line of a paragraph of text, but Rmarkdown does not, nor can I figure out a way to do so.

Here's a simple example:

---
title: "minimal"
author: "prison rodeo"
output: pdf_document  
---

This is an R Markdown document. 

I would like this paragraph to be first-line indented, but it is not.

Using > indents the entire paragraph, which is not what I'm looking for. I've tried spaces/tabs at the beginning of each paragraph, and using \indent; neither seems to work. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The default Pandoc template includes an indent argument. If set to true, paragraphs start with an indentation.

----
title: "Title"
author: "Me"
output: pdf_document
indent: true
----

Answer 2

I believe the following in your YAML header will work the same and has the advantage of still compiling should you decide to knit your document to an HTML file (though, I haven't tested this).

----
title: "Title"
author: "Me"
header-includes:
   - \setlength\parindent{24pt}
output:
    pdf_document
----