Creating a 3D button pop-up effect on the selected tab

All – I would like to create a 3D button pop-up effect on the selected tab of my tabset, which involves thickening and darkening the bottom and right borders (done) and making the tab identification text pop up and to the left. This is where I have a problem. Everything I’ve tried trial and error with padding and margin-top and margin-bottom pushes the text DOWN from the centerline. (E.G. padding=0 puts the text at the centerline. padding=6 moves the text down. Padding=-6 also moves the text down. This is ALSO true if you adjust the height to be a bigger number, if you thought I was running out of pixels.) I do not know how to move the text UP from the centerline of the tab identification area. How do you do that? Thanks, – Ben