Text Vertical Alignment/Centering

[adamsih300u]

Hi there!

Pretty new Scrivener user here, love the software and the look of it - amazingly usable. I have one question, at least for now, and I apologize if it’s been asked/answered elsewhere - I did a search and nothing came up.

Is there any fairly simple way to vertically center a block of text in the page? I’m thinking specifically in the case of ePub format, where you can ‘reflow’ text, based on font size, in the reader device/software which can alter vertical spacing (hence my not wanting to press ‘Enter’ a number of times to get the text in the center, which would work for PDF or print output).

Thanks!

-Adam

[HeadOrange]

Was this ever address? I have done a bunch of searches and I haven’t been able to find anything. Would be quite helpful for kindle/epub formats where text reflows based on font size.

[xiamenese]

Since neither Scrivener, until your project is compiled, nor ePub have any concept of pages, it is unlikely that you will be able to centre text on a page.

Scrivener has a page preview, based I believe on standard paperbook page size and margins, but even on compile, whatever you open the result in, it can appear differently, down to fonts, font-metrics, standard kerning, etc.

ePub is basically HTML, in which there is no way of setting pages. Some traditional publishers in converting their publications to ePub have ways of faking page numbering to match (one of) their paper editions, but it seems it’s not normally available to self-publishers.

Mark

[erlend]

Hi Adam.

I was actually trying to achieve the same, and sent a question to tech-support.

I wanted to:

1. Center the text vertically on the title page

• and -

2. Bottom-aligning the copyright page to the lower end of the page

Jeffrey at L&L gave me the following reply:

I’m afraid there is no simple answer to the first question, as it depends entirely on the specifics. If the title that you are trying to center is a chapter title or similar, you would generally do this by going to “File > Compile > Formatting” and adjusting the “Page Padding” setting for the appropriate item.

As far as aligning the colophon text along the bottom border, I’m not aware of anyway to do this within Scrivener, and I’m not even sure it’s possible (but I’m not an expert on eBook formatting, which is an emerging standard as it is, so it is still evolving).

I found this answer useful, and thought I’d share it with others with similar questions.

Thanks, Jeffrey.

---

As Mark mentions, epub is basically HTML, and I’ve seen people describe how to center vertically using HTML and CSS. But we can’t do this with Scrivener just yet, it seems. I’m sure you’ll find another way around this, though.

Also, I’ve seen some people mention that this could also be a challenge since eBooks are made to be viewed on any device, with any resolution. So while you could use percentages to center-align, you would probably still get some strange line breaks and page breaks that could cause conflict.

I guess the lesson I got from this was “keep it simple”.

Good luck!

Regards,
Erlend