How to vertically center text in a box in Illustrator CS5

Question

How do I vertically center text in a box in Illustrator CS5? I cannot find a way to do that; in InDesign, it's a click away!

Answer 1

From Illustrator text Vertical Align (check the link for tutorial):

I noticed in a few forums people wanting to use vertical align and a little frustrated at why they can’t. The reason is that Illustrator isn’t a layout application (and neither is photoshop) though people use it for that purpose. InDesign is the layout application and yes InDesign has vertical alignment of text boxes.

If you want a text to be centered vertically with the image holder, select the items you want to align and use the “align” pallet. You also might want to play around with the “align to” area in the bottom right part of the palette. Also to note is that when you have at least two objects selected the icons in the align palette show up at the top in the toolbar.

The trick is the change of mindset, don’t align the text to the text area, but the text area to something else.

Answer 2

As Yisela explains, you need a workaround. Here's the best I've found, along similar lines to Yisela's but a bit more automated:

1. Get the Fit Text To Content script from Kelso Cartography (download, or see example and code in this answer in case link goes down). Install (copy to illustrator folder/ presets/[language]/scripts, reboot illustrator).

2. When you're happy with everything about the text except its alignment, make sure there's some other element that they can be aligned against.

   • If you're centre aligning, that's usually easy, there's probably some image or frame you're centre-aligning against (if not, use same method as bottom align).
   • If you're bottom aligning, that might not be so easy as you probably don't want it right flush against any container. Easy answer: create a clear (no fill, no stroke) rectangle as a wrapper that exactly overlaps each text box, send it to back, group each text-box/wrapper-rectangle pair, then do stepd 3 and 4 below in isolation mode (double click the group).
3. Select each text area and run the script. Be aware of things like line spacing and paragraph spacing affecting the total area. E.g. you might end up with extra space at the bottom of the text area, in which case, add balancing padding at the top.
4. Use the Align window... Window > Align if it's not already visible or docked.
   • For centre align, in the Align palette switch Align to to Key object, make sure the thing you're aligning against is above your text frame, then hit the Vertical Align Center button
   • For bottom align, just select both text and object and hit the Vertical align bottom button.

If/when you need to change the text and re-align, just run the script again (it can stretch the text box out to accommodate overflowing content, as well as shrinking it down), and align again.

Not quite as simple as in InDesign, but hitting two buttons after each content change isn't so bad.

Answer 3

The "key object" align function is really handy for this.

1. Select the objects in question (presumably your text frame and an image or background.

2. Click on your key object again, that's the area you're aligning to. You'll notice that it gets a selection border that's three or four times thicker than normal.

3. Now you'll find that the align to indicator (in the panel or the control bar) shows a little key icon. When you use any align option, everything aligns itself to that object.