'CSS set li indent

Googling and searching stack overflow did not return any results that I could recognize, so forgive me if this has been asked before...

I have drop down main menu which uses lists as its basis. The problem is, the lists are very wide, and they do not indent far enough when expanded. So, this is my problem! How do I make the indent amount on lists larger via CSS?

htmlcss


Solution 1:[1]

padding-left is what controls the indentation of ul not margin-left.

Compare: Here's setting padding-left to 0, notice all the indentation disappears.

ul {
  padding-left: 0;
}
<ul>
  <li>section a
    <ul>
      <li>one</li>
      <li>two</li>
      <li>three</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>section b
    <ul>
      <li>one</li>
      <li>two</li>
      <li>three</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

and here's setting margin-left to 0px. Notice the indentation does NOT change.

ul {
  margin-left: 0;
}
<ul>
  <li>section a
    <ul>
      <li>one</li>
      <li>two</li>
      <li>three</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>section b
    <ul>
      <li>one</li>
      <li>two</li>
      <li>three</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

Solution 2:[2]

Also try:

ul {
  list-style-position: inside;
}

Solution 3:[3]

li{
    margin-left:50px;
}

or replace 50px with whatever you want.

Solution 4:[4]

I found that doing it in two relatively simple steps seemed to work quite well. The first css definition for ul sets the base indent that you want for the list as a whole. The second definition sets the indent value for each nested list item within it. In my case they are the same, but you can obviously pick whatever you want.

ul {
    margin-left: 1.5em;
}

ul > ul {
    margin-left: 1.5em;
}

Solution 5:[5]

Using the chrome dev tools and looking at the styles applied to a ul element by the user agent stylesheet (at the time of writing), the default styles in Chrome are:

ul {
    display: block;
    list-style-type: disc;
    margin-block-start: 1em;
    margin-block-end: 1em;
    margin-inline-start: 0px;
    margin-inline-end: 0px;
    padding-inline-start: 40px;
}

The padding-inline-start property is used to set the indentation of the bullets (and the bullets of child lists).

The padding-inline-start CSS property defines the logical inline start padding of an element, which maps to a physical padding depending on the element's writing mode, directionality, and text orientation.

(The other default properties may also help people get the look that they're after)

Note that this was mentioned earlier in a comment by @preferred_anon on another answer, but I missed that when I was first looking, so I've added this answer.

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1
Solution 2 Josh Crozier
Solution 3 ricick
Solution 4 Craig
Solution 5 Jono Job

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