Beginraggedright

Beginraggedright is commonly referenced in TeX/LaTeX discussions as the idea of starting a block of text that is left-aligned with a ragged right edge. In actual LaTeX, the standard form to achieve this effect is \begin{raggedright} ... \end{raggedright}, or equivalently a local declaration \raggedright within a group or environment such as a minipage or quote. The effect is to disable full justification for the enclosed paragraphs, producing a cleaner left edge and uneven right margins.

The environment is often employed for short quotations, narrow columns, captions, or blocks of text that should not be stretched to fit the line length. It preserves paragraph indentation and hyphenation behavior but avoids forcing lines to justify to the right margin. Because the right margin is not aligned, readability may improve in certain contexts but can reduce uniformity in a document designed around full justification.

In practice, beginraggedright is not the standard name of an environment in LaTeX; the conventional syntax uses raggedright. It is related to the flushleft environment, which also yields left-aligned text, but flushleft acts as a structural environment while raggedright is a declaration that affects line breaking within citations, notes, or blocks. Related options include raggedleft, which produces a ragged left edge, and centering for centered text.

See also: raggedleft, flushleft, justify, LaTeX typography basics.