HowTo: Insert new line and spacing at content of WPF TextBlock control

While adding more voice commands at SpeechTurtle, I had to update the active legend where the available commands are displayed and their text is highlighted as the respective commands are recognized by the speech recognition engine (using .NET’s managed Speech API).

A problem I faced was how to add a newline and prefixing the 2nd line with some spaces to align with the first command at the 1st line…

First of all, adding a new line was easy, inserted a <LineBreak /> tag in the XAML inside the TextBlock tag’s content, as shown in the screenshot below:

Then I had the issue that I needed to add some spacing so that “Pen up” at the 2nd line starts exactly under the start of “Forward” at the 1st line (see screenshot above)…

Tried to add a Run tag, with its Text set to some spaces, but couldn’t get an exact positioning:

So I tried using a Separator instead, since I could define a Width for it, however, it was drawing as a gray line:

So I either had to change its color to White or Transparent, or use a Null Foreground Brush on it (one difference of a Null brush from a Transparent one is that the element ignores Mouse events in that case from what I remember), or just set its Visibility mode to Hidden:

Do note that WPF has another visibility mode apart from Visible and Hidden, that is Collapsed, where the respective control disappears from the layout flow (that value is not supported in Silverlight from what I remember), which is not what we wanted in this case (Hidden was the correct option to choose):