uses a negative value for text-indent and a positive value for padding-left.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title></title> <style type="text/css" media="Screen"> * .myStyle { text-indent: -50px; padding-left: 50px; } </style> </head> <body> <p class="myStyle">asdf </p> </body> </html>