HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

9.3. First-Line Indentation

In the example in the previous section, I centered the text in the explanatory paragraphs under each subheading. That was not, as I said at the time, necessarily a great design, but it did demonstrate how alignment can produce "air" or negative space.

Another, perhaps more conventional, way to accomplish this objective with blocks of text is to indent the first line of each paragraph.

The text-indent property controls the amount of extra left padding that's applied to the first line of a block of text. The property requires a measurement or percentage of the element width as a value.

Replace the style rule for paragraphs in the above CSS with a new one like this:

p {
  text-indent: 2em;
}

The result will look like ...