Text alignment in figure layouts

[DillonHammill]

Hi everyone,

How does one change the alignment of text with a Quarto figure layout? Here is a snippet of a layout containing two images and some text underneath:

::: {layout-ncol=2}
![]() # image 1
![]() # image 2

This is the text in the layout but it is center-aligned under the layout in the rendered PDF document.

:::

The text in the layout is always center-aligned under the layout when rendered to PDF. Does anyone know how to override this to be left aligned in the rendered PDF?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[dragonstyle]

Either of these produce pretty good results for me - do either of these work for you?

::: {#fig-test layout-ncol=2 fig-cap="This is the text in the layout but it is center-aligned under the layout in the rendered PDF document."}

![](1.jpg){width="250"}

![](2.jpg){width="250"}

:::

or

::: {layout-ncol=2}

![](1.jpg){width="250"}

![](2.jpg){width="250"}

:::

This is the text in the layout but it is center-aligned under the layout in the rendered PDF document.

[mcanouil]

@dragonstyle Me being curious, is it Quarto or Pandoc that add the {\centering ...} in the minipage layout? By the way, this is not consistent with HTML formats.
(I wanted to figure out the answer of this one earlier today and realised doing so that the centering was hard written, meaning was not that easy to change)

[dragonstyle]

It is Quarto - we are treating that text paragraph as another column in the layout and so placing it centered in a minipage...

[mcanouil]

So, \centering could be replaced by something parsed from the div cell isn't it? Possibly a text-align parameter that could work for both PDF and HTML formats.

[dragonstyle]

Yes, I think it could (e.g. we could generate various alignment commands)!

[fuhrmanator]

I ran into this problem today. I'll post my workaround below.

[fuhrmanator]

I'm using the custom layouts, namely two columns to show an image and some text. I'm doing this, because a markdown table results in odd vertical alignment in the PDF (the text aligns with the bottom of the image, which looks bad when you have multiple lines of text).

Here's the ref to the documentation: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/figures.html#vertical-alignment

Here's a MWE:

::: {layout="[10,-2,30]" layout-valign="center"}
![](https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)

This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
:::

This is great in HTML:

The text is left-aligned, which is what I expect.

However, in the PDF output, the text is centered, which is not what I would expect:

I turned on keep-tex in the preamble of my MWE, and I can see that there is the use of \centering:

\begin{minipage}[c]{0.83\linewidth}

{\centering 

This work is licensed under a
\href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/}{Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License}.

}

\end{minipage}%

So, I wonder if there's a better way to do this in LaTeX. Perhaps use \centering only if it's an image? This would be more consistent with the HTML output.

Based on how the LaTeX is generated, I hacked a workaround for my MWE which relies on \justifying from the ragged2e package, if anyone needs a fix. Perhaps there's a simpler way?

---
format: 
    pdf:
        keep-tex: true
        header-includes: |
          \usepackage{ragged2e}
        
---

::: {layout="[5,-1,30]" layout-valign="center"}
![](https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)

This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
:::

::: {layout="[5,-1,30]" layout-valign="center"}
![](https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)

\justifying \noindent This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
:::

Cheers!

[kompre]

Thanks for the workaround @fuhrmanator

Has been there any more development on this issue?