Line alignment with \par

Question

I was writing a document in LaTeX and found out that I am not able to properly align the text when I use \\ or \newline

Here is the code.

 \par{ {\bfseries{\today}} \vspace{1\baselineskip}

 Name \\
 Address \\
 Contact Details
       }

The output is like

What I want is that Address and Contact Details appear just below Name.

Answer 1

You can just add a \par at the end of each line which produces the first section below. Note that each paragraph is indented. As Marc van Dongen commented, if you want things to be at the left margin, you need to add a \noindent, as shown in the second example:

However, for this kind of material is better to use a tabular environment:

Notes:

• The showframe package was used to show the margins of the page.
• \bfseries does not take a parameter, so the correct usage would have been {\bfseries\today}.
• You can use \bigskip, \medskip, \smallskip for vertical space adjustments, or add an optional space after in the tabular as \\[2.0ex]

Code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{showframe}

\begin{document}
\textbf{\today} 
\vspace{1\baselineskip}

Name\par
Address\par
Contact Details

\bigskip
\noindent\textbf{\today} 
\vspace{1\baselineskip}
\par\noindent Name
\par\noindent Address
\par\noindent Contact Details

\bigskip
\noindent
\begin{tabular}{@{}ll}
\textbf{\today} \\[2.0ex]
Name            & Shashwat \\
Address         & 123 Any Street \\
Contact Details & myemail@provider.com \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}