CSS Trick: Paragraph Indenting

Here’s another simple :CSS: trick: automatically indenting paragraphs like I have in my entries.  It’s really simple to indent all your paragraphs:

p {
text-indent: 1.2em;
}

That code will simply indent every paragraph on your site.  You’ll notice here, though, that the first paragraph of my entries is not indented; only following paragraphs.  In order to get that effect you need to use an adjacent sibling CSS selector:

p+p {
text-indent: 1.2em;
}

What this code does is apply the style to any paragraph (<p>) that immediately follows another paragraph.  In my own case, however, I only wanted the style effect applied to the actual weblog entries; I didn’t want it appearing in other places like the sidebar where you might also find multiple paragraph tags in a row.  To achieve that, I simply used a standard decendant CSS selector by applying the style only to adjacent paragraphs that were inside the element with the “main” CSS ID:

#main p+p {
text-indent: 1.2em;
}

This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.

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