Centering text within a frame

[Matthew Bellringer]

I'm struggling to get text aligning properly in Affinity Publisher. I want to centre text within a layout box dynamically, so that whatever is there is centred properly. If I use the Frame Text Tool and do that, bullet points get really strange.

I want my text to appear in the centre of the frame, left justified. The box on the right is centre-justified, and the bullet points are not. What I would like is to have the text appear as in the example on the left, but centred in a box snapped to the underlying layout grid on the right. How can I do that?

 

[Old Bruce]

Hi and welcome to the forums @Matthew Bellringer,

Try with out a tab in the Bullets and numbering. You may want a space of some sort use anything other than a tab. En space, Em space, regular space etc...

[Matthew Bellringer]

Thank you! That's definitely a big improvement on where I was before and it's at least usable now.

It's still not quite what I was going for, though. What I'd like is a left-aligned block of text floating in the middle/centre of the right-hand frame. Literally the exact layout of text as in the left of my original screenshot, but centred in the box on the right.

Currently if I centre-align the block to get it in the middle of the box, then each line is independently centre-aligned. Which is what I'd normally expect, it's just I don't want that this time! It means that with different topic lengths lead to misaligned bullet points, which aren't a good look (see screenshot).

I'm sorry @Old Bruce, my original confusion/workaround around the position of the bullet points themselves might have been a red-herring. But I do at least understand that feature now!

[Old Bruce]

You could also try using two linked frames and centre the lower one to the top one. In my opinion that would be more work.

[MikeW]

Try just increasing the left indent for the bullet style until the text is visually centered. 

[Matthew Bellringer]

I'm trying to create a situation where the box is centred automatically for any arbitrary text without having to change the layout depending on the text. This is a layout for repeated re-use, and having to re-align everything each time is a dealbreaker.

Essentially, I want to be able to have a place where I can put any text in the middle of a frame, and have it appear left-aligned. A box aligned within a box. Is there any way to achieve that?

[Old Bruce]

25 minutes ago, Matthew Bellringer said:

I'm trying to create a situation where the box is centred automatically for any arbitrary text without having to change the layout depending on the text. This is a layout for repeated re-use, and having to re-align everything each time is a dealbreaker.

Essentially, I want to be able to have a place where I can put any text in the middle of a frame, and have it appear left-aligned. A box aligned within a box. Is there any way to achieve that?

I think I don't have a clue as to what you really want to achieve.

If you could give an example of a real world situation, meaning not this

Topic

•Subtopic

•Subtopic

•Subtopic

 

but something like this

Topic

•The first instance

•A second heading of a different length

•Finished work

 

Are the Bullets made by using the Paragraph Style or can they be just actually typed in? Are these, "•Subtopic"s, actually headings or just text that I am wrongly assuming are headings? Will they always be of a length that will fit on one line or will there be an instance where they are longer than one line?

[h_d]

A straightforward way of adjusting the relative positions of the bullets and the text within the frame is to go to View, choose Show Text Ruler and fiddle with the sliders:

 

But I don't think there can be an automatic way of centring a longest line of arbitrary length on the frame, and then left-aligning the rest of the text on that. If the length of the longest line is arbitrary, then the position of its first character is also arbitrary, and you would have to use manual adjustment. Plus, as @Old Bruce points out, what happens if one of your lines is longer than the width of the frame?

[Matthew Bellringer]

I really appreciate the help you've all offered. Thank you. I understand a lot better now.

The essence of the question is how to get a consistent layout with different text each time, just by editing the text. From what everyone has shared, that's not possible at the moment. Sorry for any confusion and lack of clarity. This is partly a question of approach, I think. My design background is web-based, not print-based, so I think about laying things out as I would text on a web page.

I guess what I'm really looking for is something that works a bit like CSS. That's what I would need to get this to work. I don't know of any design programme that supports that, though! It would be amazing if it existed...

Having played with what's available to me, the answer is that I can't do what I'd planned so I'm going to go back to the drawing board in terms of the objects and the workflows involved in their formatting/positioning.

Edited June 26, 2021 by Matthew Bellringer