Question

I’m having some problems with my ul-list after using applying CSS-reset.

When the text in the li is long and it breaks to a second line, the text begins under the bullet. I’d like it to start with the same margin/padding as the text on the right side of the bullet.

Sort of hard to explain, but if you look at the example-image. The left-image is the list today. "motta varsel […]" begins under the bullet, but I’d like it to look the picture on the right.

How can I do this with CSS? I assume there is something very simple I’ve overlooked, but I can’t figure out what. Google searches did not return anything useful either.

Answer 1

The li tag has a property called list-style-position. This makes your bullets inside or outside the list. On default, it’s set to inside. That makes your text wrap around it. If you set it to outside, the text of your li tags will be aligned.

The downside of that is that your bullets won’t be aligned with the text outside the ul. If you want to align it with the other text you can use a margin.

ul li {
    /*
     * We want the bullets outside of the list,
     * so the text is aligned. Now the actual bullet
     * is outside of the list’s container
     */
    list-style-position: outside;

    /*
     * Because the bullet is outside of the list’s
     * container, indent the list entirely
     */
    margin-left: 1em;
}

---

Edit 15th of March, 2014
Seeing people are still coming in from Google, I felt like the original answer could use some improvement

• Changed the code block to provide just the solution
• Changed the indentation unit to em’s
• Each property is applied to the ul element
• Good comments 🙂