8.1 Paragraphs: centering and quoting

Paragraphs in Muse must be separated by a blank line.

Centered paragraphs and quotations

A line that begins with six or more columns of whitespace (either tabs or spaces) indicates a centered paragraph. Alternatively, you can use the <center> tag to surround regions that are to be published as centered paragraphs.

But if a line begins with whitespace, though less than six columns, it indicates a quoted paragraph. Alternatively, you can use the <quote> tag to surround regions that are to be published as quoted paragraphs.

Literal paragraphs

The <example> tag is used for examples, where whitespace should be preserved, the text rendered in monospace, and any characters special to the output style escaped.

There is also the <literal> tag, which causes a marked block to be entirely left alone. This can be used for inserting a hand-coded HTML blocks into HTML output, for example.

If you want some text to only be inserted when publishing to a particular publishing style, use the style attribute for the <literal> tag. An example follows.

     <literal style="latex">
     A LaTeX-based style was used in the publishing of this document.
     </literal>

This will leave the region alone if the current publishing style is “latex” or based on “latex”, such as “pdf”, and delete the region otherwise. It is also possible to leave the text alone only for one particular style, rather than its derivations, by adding exact="t" to the tag.

Line breaks

If you need a line break, then use the ‘<br>’ tag. Most of the time this tag is unnecessary, because Muse will automatically detect paragraphs by means of blank lines. If you want to preserve newlines in several lines of text, then use verse markup instead (see Verse).