About
Utilize this tool to horizontally center text by evenly padding both the left and right sides with spaces or any character of your choice. Keep in mind that this alignment feature is only compatible with monospaced fonts such as Courier and Monaco.
Center plain text within a chosen line width. Align short headings and labels in a monospace text layout.
How to use
Set the target width and padding character, paste the lines, and center them. Use one padding character for predictable alignment.
Example
At width 10, the word Hi gains four padding spaces on each side.
FAQ
Will it center text in a web page?
No. It inserts characters rather than CSS alignment. Use a monospace font and prevent wrapping when displaying the result.
A practical task
A centered title for a terminal note needs a fixed display width. For a 20 column heading, try one short line and inspect the count of spaces on both sides. An odd padding total necessarily leaves one side with an extra character.
Another useful question
What happens to an overlong line?
Centering is not wrapping or shortening. Reduce the text or use a wider target when the original already exceeds the requested width.
Details for interpreting the result
| Detail | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Monospace alignment | In a monospace font, ordinary characters occupy a regular grid. Proportional fonts use different widths, so inserted spaces do not create reliable visual columns. Check display settings before judging padded text. |
| Whitespace characters | An ordinary space, a tab, a nonbreaking space, and a zero width space are different characters. They can look similar or invisible. Choose the exact kind of cleanup instead of treating all blank looking input as equivalent. |
| Tabs and positions | A tab character usually moves to a tab stop in an editor. Replacing it with a fixed number of spaces is a different operation. The visible distance depends on the editor's tab width and the current position. |
| Trimming and content | Trimming removes characters from an edge rather than the middle. Whole text trimming differs from trimming every line. Preserve indentation in code or structured text when it carries meaning. |
| Paragraphs and lines | A manual line break and a paragraph boundary serve different purposes. Export tools can map them differently. Inspect lists, addresses, and intentional blank lines rather than treating every visible break as interchangeable. |
| Line endings | A line break can use LF or CRLF. They look similar in an editor but contain different characters. Byte comparisons and checksums depend on the exact representation, including a final line break. |
| Visible symbols | What looks like one symbol can contain several Unicode components. Emoji sequences can include a base symbol, a skin tone, and joining characters. Counting or splitting them by bytes changes their structure. |
