## Preformatted Text

The `PRE` element can be used to include preformatted text. User agents render this in a fixed pitch font, preserving spacing associated with white space characters such as space and newline characters. Automatic word-wrap should be disabled within `PRE` elements.

Note that the SGML standard requires that the parser remove a newline immediately following the start tag or immediately preceding the end tag.

`PRE` has the same content model as paragraphs, excluding images and elements that produce changes in font size, e.g. `IMG`, `BIG`, `SMALL`, `SUB`, `SUP` and `FONT`.

A few user agents support the `WIDTH` attribute. It provides a hint to the user agent of the required width in characters. The user agent can use this to select an appropriate font size or to indent the content appropriately.

Here is an example of a `PRE` element; a verse from Shelley (To a Skylark):

    <PRE>
    	   Higher still and higher
    		 From the earth thou springest
    	   Like a cloud of fire;
    		 The blue deep thou wingest,
    And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
    </PRE>

which is rendered as:

           Higher still and higher
    		 From the earth thou springest
    	   Like a cloud of fire;
    		 The blue deep thou wingest,
    And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

The horizontal tab character (encoded in Unicode, US ASCII and ISO 8859-1 as decimal 9) should be interpreted as the smallest non-zero number of spaces which will leave the number of characters so far on the line as a multiple of 8. Its use is strongly discouraged since it is common practice when editing to set the tab-spacing to other values, leading to misaligned documents.

#### XMP, LISTING and PLAINTEXT

These are obsolete tags for preformatted text that predate the introduction of PRE. User agents may support these for backwards compatibility. Authors should avoid using them in new documents!