LaTeX forum ⇒ General ⇒ Can't stom centering

[avp3000]

Hi all,

I noticed that, wenn I'm doing a presentation and put \centering on a slide, after that the text on the other slides is also centered, although I had enclosed the \centering command with {}. For example:

%Slide 1
{\centering Here is the text I want to be centered.}

%Slide 2
And here is the text I don't want to be centered, but it still is.

Why is that?

Thank you very much,
Alexander

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Alexander,

try a paragraph break by an empty line or \par (or break the line by \\) to end \centering:

{\centering Here is the text I want to be centered.\\}

Stefan

[avp3000]

Hello Stephen,

I tried that but it didn't want to compile the file. However, this is not a big thing, as I just use \begin{center}. I was just wondering why the hell it does that. Thank you for your advice.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

See here: \centering.
The scope of \centering needs to be limited, for instance by \par, else it affects the next lines too.

\begin{center} uses \centering internally too, but puts a list around it. One side effect of \begin{center} is that additional vertical space occures before and after the centered Text. If I don't want that I use {\centering text \\} or similar with \par.

Stefan

[localghost]

[...] One side effect of \begin{center} is that additional vertical space occures before and after the centered Text. [...]

To avoid that, you could define a new environment (best placed in the preamble) that has no additional space above and below the centred text. Corresponding to its purpose I called the new environment centered.

\newenvironment{centered}{%
  \begin{list}{}{%
    \topsep0pt
  }
  \centering
  \item[]
}
{\end{list}}

This is very similar to the internally defined center environment, which uses a trivlist environment with fixed parameters (like \topsep). Here we have a general list environment where we can give new parameters and so nearly eliminate the additional vertical spaces.


Best regards
Thorsten

[avp3000]

Thank you both for the valuable information. It really helped.