Problem removing first line indents in PDF compile

I’m trying to compile my manuscript as a PDF. Most of the indenting is going just fine. Removing the indent at the first paragraph, keeping it for the rest of them etc.
But I have a specific section where I need to remove the indenting entirely. So I made the new section and section layout, applied them properly. Set the little arrows on the ruler thingy in the layout all the way to the left until it read 0"
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I compile the document as a PDF to check if it worked properly, only to see this:

Some paragraphs have a tiny little indent at the first line, while the top and bottom ones don’t. I don’t know how to fix this, and it’s just noticeable enough that I don’t want to leave it like this either.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much!

Edit: The ‘paragraph first line indents’ setting is set to ‘Do not change’ by the way.

I would personally compile to a different format to see if it ain’t by any chance the PDF compile that is misbehaving.
So keep everything as it is, but just compile to RTF instead (for e.g.).

Aah thank you! the different format didn’t fix the problem but opening it in a text editor made me notice it had nothing to do with the formatting at all. There were spaces right at the start of those paragraphs. (-_-)

I feel a little stupid but at least it’s fixed now.

Because I too sometimes end up with spaces at the beginning of paragraphs (due to splitting paragraphs into smaller paragraphs a bit carelessly – as in, just hitting return at the end of a sentence to get a feel of how it looks, then deciding, all the while forgetting about that space I just orphaned), when I’m done (or almost done) with a project, one thing I do is run a global project replace, where I replace return-space with return.
No need then to look for such a mistake : if there is one of that nature somewhere, anywhere, it’ll get fixed and that’s that.

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Smart. I’ll do that from now on. :grinning:

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You can also clean up the opposite in a separate operation :
replace space-return with return.

For almost any bad habit that you may be aware of, there is gonna be a way (using logic) to fix it across the whole project through a simple run of project replace.

Just make sure to backup your project before experimenting with this. It is a destructive process.