How to change a span to look like a pre with CSS?
Look at the W3C CSS2.1 Default Style Sheet or the CSS2.2 Working Draft. Copy all the settings for PRE and put them into your own class.
pre {
display: block;
unicode-bidi: embed;
font-family: monospace;
white-space: pre;
}
See the white-space CSS property.
.like-pre { white-space: pre; }