How to Customize Text Alignment & Text Spacing in CSS

Horizontal align

The texts are left aligned by default, but you can change that by setting a text-align property, which accepts four values, left, right, center, and justify.

<p class="p1">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...</p>
<p class="p2">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...</p>
<p class="p3">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...</p>
<p class="p4">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...</p>

#p1 {
  text-align: left;
}
 
#p2 {
  text-align: right;
}
 
#p3 {
  text-align: center;
}
 
#p4 {
  text-align: justify;
}

Notice that the text-align property of p4 is set to justify, but the last line of the paragraph remains left-aligned.

The final line is not stretched to fill the full width because justify applies only to complete lines of text.

However, you can force it to be justified using the text-align-last property, which takes the same set of values as text-align.

p {
  text-align: justify;
  text-align-last: justify;
}

Vertical align

Besides horizontal alignment, you can also specify how you wish the text to be aligned vertically. By default, all the texts are aligned to the baseline, as shown in the diagram below:

Some letters, like y and p in this diagram, extend below the baseline, but their main body remains aligned to it.

You can change the default behavior by setting a vertical-align property. For instance, top will align the texts to the highest letter in the same line.

<p>AAA<span class="large">AAA</span><span class="small">aaa</span></p>

span {
  border: 1px red solid;
}
 
.large {
  font-size: large;
}
 
.small {
  font-size: small;
  vertical-align: top;
}

To make the effect more noticeable, we have changed the font size and added borders to each element. We will discuss how to do this later.

As you can see, the upper border of .small is aligned with the upper borders of .large.

On the other hand, the text-top option will align the text with the highest letter in the parent element, which is <p> in this case.

.small {
  font-size: small;
  vertical-align: text-top;
}

Notice that the .large element is ignored even though it is slightly higher. This is because .large is a sibling of .small, not the parent.

The bottom and text-bottom works similarly. bottom aligns the text to the lowest letter in the same line, and text-bottom aligns to the lowest letter in the parent element.

Lastly, the middle option aligns the text to the center of the parent element, and the sub and super options each align to the subscript and superscript baseline of the parent text. You can test these in your own browser.