Re: position: center

David Woolley wrote:

>>vertically, which accepts the four values: top, middle (or center?),
>>bottom and justify.
> 
> The analogous behaviour to text align would be to align the text in
> each rendered line in the vertical centre of that line, not to align
> a whole block.

   What?  I don't understand why each individual line of text would be 
in the vertical centre, therefore overlapping each other.  For 
horizontal centering, each individual character is not placed at the 
center of the line, so why should this same principle occur for each 
line vertically?

   An example of what I was intending to achieve with the property can 
be demonstrated using Microsoft Word's vertical align property in the 
page setup dialog, on the Layout tab.  This implements the four 
properties I gave above.  I realise that that option is applied to the 
whole page, but a page is just a box like any other.

> Aligning a block vertically requires a fixed height, removing a degree
> of freedom, and therefore possibly forcing overflow behaviour when the
> user overrides the font size.  Actually centering frustrates
> incremental rendering or requires text to moved as it is rendered.

   Vertical positioning doesn't necessarily require a fixed box size, it 
simply requires that the size of the box be calculated before rendering 
can begin or continually reflow while rendering, until complete.  Since 
this is done anyway as rendering occurs, this should not a problem.

CYA
...Lachy

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2004 18:06:31 UTC