#title: 'CSS: Indenting Text' date: 2019-04-05 00:00:00 Z permalink: "/indenting-text-with-css/" layout: post description: Implement better typography styling by taking advantage of text-indent summary: Implement better typography styling by taking advantage of the extremely useful CSS text-indent property. redirect_from: "/2019/04/05/indenting-text-with-css/"

A lot of developers tend to do the bare minimum when it comes to implementing proper website typography. This isn't an insult - I'm happy that typography is given any thought at all during development, I just believe more can always be done to improve upon it.

In today's TypeTip we're going to play around with the text-indent property, look into when it's best to use it and how to implement it properly.

#The property and browser support

Browser support is actually pretty great for such a regularly over-looked CSS property. All major desktop and mobile browsers support it:

Now that doesn't mean you should just slap this property on all your type elements and call it a day - there are specific use cases for text-indent and some basic rules to follow:

#Use Cases

1. Increasing readability of large text blocks that would otherwise overwhelm the reader
2. Replicating book or report typography layouts

#Basic Rules

1. Best to set this property on inner type children only - meaning items like p or blockquotes instead of main headings
2. When used on paragraph tags it's best to target only p elements that directly follow a sibling tag (see "The CSS" below)

#The CSS

Adding the property is extremely trivial, all you need is the following:

/* Best practice for paragraphs */
p + p {
    text-indent: 1rem; /* whatever you want */
}

#Let's see it in action

See the Pen Simple text-indent by Bradley Taunt (@bradleytaunt) on CodePen.