Vertically and horizontally centering text in circle in CSS (like iphone notification badge)

Solution 1:

Horizontal centering is easy: text-align: center;. Vertical centering of text inside an element can be done by setting line-height equal to the container height, but this has subtle differences between browsers. On small elements, like a notification badge, these are more pronounced.

Better is to set line-height equal to font-size (or slightly smaller) and use padding. You'll have to adjust your height to accomodate.

Here's a CSS-only, single <div> solution that looks pretty iPhone-like. They expand with content.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ThinkingStiff/mLW47/

Output:

CSS:

.badge {
    background: radial-gradient( 5px -9px, circle, white 8%, red 26px );
    background-color: red;
    border: 2px solid white;
    border-radius: 12px; /* one half of ( (border * 2) + height + padding ) */
    box-shadow: 1px 1px 1px black;
    color: white;
    font: bold 15px/13px Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma;
    height: 16px; 
    min-width: 14px;
    padding: 4px 3px 0 3px;
    text-align: center;
}

HTML:

<div class="badge">1</div>
<div class="badge">2</div>
<div class="badge">3</div>
<div class="badge">44</div>
<div class="badge">55</div>
<div class="badge">666</div>
<div class="badge">777</div>
<div class="badge">8888</div>
<div class="badge">9999</div>

Solution 2:

Modern Solution

The result is that the circle never gets distorted and the text stays exactly in the middle of the circle - vertically and horizontally.

.circle {
  background: gold;
  width: 40px; 
  height: 40px;
  border-radius: 50%;
  display: flex; /* or inline-flex */
  align-items: center; 
  justify-content: center;
}

<div class="circle">text</div>

Simple and easy to use. Enjoy!

Solution 3:

If you have content with height unknown but you know the height the of container. The following solution works extremely well.

HTML

<div class="center-test">
    <span></span><p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. 
    Nesciunt obcaecati maiores nulla praesentium amet explicabo ex iste asperiores 
    nisi porro sequi eaque rerum necessitatibus molestias architecto eum velit 
    recusandae ratione.</p>
</div>

CSS

.center-test { 
   width: 300px; 
   height: 300px; 
   text-align: 
   center; 
   background-color: #333; 
}
.center-test span { 
   height: 300px; 
   display: inline-block; 
   zoom: 1; 
   *display: inline; 
   vertical-align: middle; 
 }
.center-test p { 
   display: inline-block; 
   zoom: 1; 
   *display: inline; 
   vertical-align: middle; 
   color: #fff; 
 }

EXAMPLE http://jsfiddle.net/thenewconfection/eYtVN/

One gotcha for newby's to display: inline-block; [span] and [p] have no html white space so that the span then doesn't take up any space. Also I've added in the CSS hack for display inline-block for IE. Hope this helps someone!

Solution 4:

Interesting question! While there are plenty of guides on horizontally and vertically centering a div, an authoritative treatment of the subject where the centered div is of an unpredetermined width is conspicuously absent.

Let's apply some basic constraints:

• No Javascript
• No mangling of the display property to table-cell, which is of questionable support status

Given this, my entry into the fray is the use of the inline-block display property to horizontally center the span within an absolutely positioned div of predetermined height, vertically centered within the parent container in the traditional top: 50%; margin-top: -123px fashion.

Markup: div > div > span

CSS:

body > div { position: relative; height: XYZ; width: XYZ; }
div > div { 
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  height: 30px;
  margin-top: -15px; 
  text-align: center;}
div > span { display: inline-block; }

Source: http://jsfiddle.net/38EFb/

An alternate solution that doesn't require extraneous markups but that very likely produces more problems than it solves is to use the line-height property. Don't do this. But it is included here as an academic note: http://jsfiddle.net/gucwW/

Solution 5:

Here is an example of flat badges that play well with zurb foundation css framework
Note: you might have to adjust the height for different fonts.

http://jsfiddle.net/jamesharrington/xqr5nx1o/

The Magic sauce!

.label {
  background:#EA2626;
  display:inline-block;
  border-radius: 12px;
  color: white;
  font-weight: bold;
  height: 17px; 
  padding: 2px 3px 2px 3px;
  text-align: center;
  min-width: 16px;
}