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

In my opinion, the answer on this page with the most votes is the best answer, but his math was wrong and I couldn't comment on it.

I needed a text input box to be exactly 40 pixels high including a 1 pixel border all the way around. Of course I wanted the text vertically aligned in the center in all browsers.

1 pixel border top
1 pixel border bottom
8 pixel top padding
8 pixel bottom padding
22 pixel font size

1 + 1 + 8 + 8 + 22 = 40 pixels exactly.

One thing to remember is that you must remove your css height property or those pixels will get added to your total above.

<input type="text" style="padding-top:8px; padding-bottom:8px; margin: 0; border: solid 1px #000000; font-size:22px;" />

This is working in Firefox, Chrome, IE 8, and Safari. I can only assume that if something simple like this is working in IE8, it should work similarly in 6, 7, and 9 but I have not tested it. Please let me know and I'll edit this post accordingly.

Answer 2

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.

<input type="text" style="padding: 11px 0px 11px 0px; font-size: 20px;" />

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

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

I know I'm late to the party but hopefully this'll help anyone looking for a concise answer that does work across all major browsers (except IE6, we have decided to stop supporting that browser so I refuse to even look at it anymore).

    #search #searchbox {
    height: 21px;
    line-height: 21px;
}

cheers! JP

Answer 4

After much searching and frustration a combo of setting height, line height and no padding worked for me when using a fixed height (24px) background image for a text input field.

.form-text {
    color: white;
    outline: none;
    background-image: url(input_text.png);
    border-width: 0px;
    padding: 0px 10px 0px 10px;
    margin: 0px;
    width: 274px;
    height: 24px;
    line-height: 24px;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

Answer 5

The inner vertical alignment will depend on font height and input height, so, it can be adjusted using padding !!!

Try some like :

.InVertAlign {
   height: 40px;
   line-height: 40px;
   font-size: 2em;
   padding: 0px 14px 3px 5px;
}

...

<input type="text" class="InVertAlign" />

Remember to adjust the values on css class according to your needs !

Answer 6

Go for line-height.

The vertical-align tag works fine for the submit button but not for the text in the input field. Setting line-height to the height of the input field works on all browsers. Incl IE7.