Whitespace in strings

[weaver6999]

How does one go about printing whitespace characters with echo? I'm attempting to center some text and since there is no option to do so with echo (possible feature enhancement?), I figured I'd try some equivalent methods. Escape sequences don't seem to work: [2J successfully clears the screen, but [12C seems to be interpreted (single blank space in output) and then ignored (no movement to the right). 'echo' with blank spaces and then the string only prints the string. 'echo' with quotes around blank spaces and string appears to print the quote, a space, and then the string, with all other leading spaces stripped. I suppose I could do 12x 'echo -n', but is there an easier/better way of doing this?