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How to Center Text and More
Throughout this tutorial, you've seen centered text
all over the place. Now I'm going to teach you how to do
it. Remember the parentheses thing I've mentioned several times? This one works the same way. Surround the text
you wish to center with <center> and </center>.
Pretty simple, huh? This trick also works for centering
graphics, lists, tables, and virtually anything else on
your page(s). I'll remind you about this again in the
section about graphics.
One of the most important parts of creating text for
your page is inserting line-breaks. If you don't do this,
some browsers will string everything together on one line. No good
if you actually want people to understand your page. Many new browsers will insert line breaks for you, but not necessarily where you want them.
To insert a break, simply put <br> after the
last word you want on the line. Obviously, you are
limited by screen width no matter how much you want on
one line; most browsers will force the text into a line
break at the edge of the window.
Making a new paragraph is done by placing <p>
after the last word in a given paragraph. This has the
same effect as a line break, but it also inserts a blank
line before the text of the next paragraph begins.
Alternately, you can place the <p> at the beginning
of a new paragraph. If employed in this way, I reccomend you
end the paragraph with </p>. Used in this fashion,
you can add attributes to the paragraph without the need
for separate HTML statements. For example, <p align="center>
yeilds a centered paragraph. Font face, size, and color
modifications must still be done using an independent
command (the <p> and <font> commands are
always separate tags).
Line breaks are always single-ended statements. You shouldn't
put </br> anywhere in your document. In fact, this
will only serve to confuse older browsers, and newer ones
will simply ignore it.
Indenting Text
Perhaps you need a bit of text to move
over just a little, but you don't want it all the way to
the center or, worse, be aligned to the right. To do this,
insert the <blockquote> tag before the text you
wish to indent. Always end the statement with </blockquote>.
Faliure to do this will result in the entire page (after
the blockquote) being indented by a universal amount. An
indented paragraph looks like this:
The amount of a single indent is
about equal to a single default tab in most word
processer programs. You can see that the entire
paragraph will be indented, not just the first line.
Adding a second <blockquote>
moves the text in an additional tab. Notice that
the tab shortens the length of the paragraph on
both ends. Don't let your lines get too short, or
you will have a VERY long page.
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