Vertically align text within input field of fixed-height without display: table or padding?

Question

The line-height property usually takes care of vertical alignment, but not with inputs. Is there a way to automatically center text without playing around with padding?

Answer 1

I ran into this problem myself. I found that not specifying an input height, but using the font-height and padding combined, results in vertically aligned text.

For instance, lets say you want to have a 42px tall input box, with a font-size of 20px. You could simply find the difference between the input height and the font-size, divide it by two, and set your padding to that amount. In this case, you would have 22px total worth of padding, which is 11px on each side.

That would give you a 42px tall input box with perfect vertical alignment.

Hope that helps.