LaTeX: blank line in centered enviroment

Question

I'm working on TeXmaker for the first time and I don't understand how to leave a blanket line inside a centered enviroment. If I write

1 Hello,\\
2
3 world!

Also in the .dvi file there is a blank line between Hello and world. But the code

1 \begin{center}
2 Hello,\\
3
4 world!
5 \end{center}

just ignores the third line and gives in output:

Hello,
world!

centered, of course. How can I put a blank line between the two words? I know I can simply close the center tag when I need a blank line, but having another alternative would be great :)

Answer 1

Try using a hard space (i.e., a tilde) and a linebreak in the blank line.

1 \begin{center}
2 Hello,\\
3 ~\\
4 world!
5 \end{center}

Answer 2

Maybe changing parskip only in certain environments might be what you want:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2180567/change-parskip-only-inside-enumerate-itemize-environment