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've not tried this myself, but try setting:

line-height: 36px;

Where 36px is the height of your imput.

Answer 2

In Opera 9.62, Mozilla 3.0.4, Safari 3.2 (for Windows) it helps, if you put some text or at least a whitespace within the same line as the input field.

<div style="line-height: 60px; height: 60px; border: 1px solid black;">
    <input type="text" value="foo" />&nbsp;
</div>

(imagine an &nbsp after the input-statement)

IE 7 ignores every CSS hack I tried. I would recommend using padding for IE only. Should make it easier for you to position it correctly if it only has to work within one specific browser.

Answer 3

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 12px total worth of padding, which is 6px on each side.

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

Hope that helps.

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

Just don't set the height of the input box, only set the font-size, that will be ok