Pre-Formatted Text

Often you'll come across some text that you wish to put on a WWW server that is pre-formatted plain text. You could of course go through the text and insert all the necessary HTML formatting commands, but often all you want to do is stop a WWW browser re-formatting it for you. HTML provides the command pair <PRE>...</PRE> to delimit text you don't want re-formatting.

    this text will
    be reformatted
    by the browser
    <PRE>
    and this text
    will not be
    reformatted
    </PRE>

this text will be reformatted by the browser
and this text
will not be
reformatted

Note that the preformatted text will be displayed in a fixed width typewriter style font. You should avoid overuse of <PRE>, as it doesn't allow WWW browsers any leeway in doing anything clever about line wrapping, and because typewriter style fonts are pretty ugly.