INFO: Text Alignment in Single Line Edit Controls

ID: Q108940

The information in this article applies to:

Text in single line edit controls cannot be centered or right-aligned (right-justified). Text in single line edit controls is left-aligned (left- justified) by default. This is by product design, and therefore specifying the ES_RIGHT or ES_CENTER style while creating the single line edit control does not have any effect on the text alignment.

Windows does not allow text to be centered or right-aligned in a single line edit control. However, an easy way to work around this problem is to create a multiline edit control that is the same size as a single line edit control. For additional information on how to calculate the height of the edit control, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 

   ARTICLE-ID: Q124315
   TITLE     : HOWTO: Calculate the Height of Edit Control to Resize It
Text in a multiline edit control can be centered or right/left aligned. Note that the multiline edit control should be created without the WS_VSCROLL or ES_AUTOVSCROLL style.

While single line edit controls may support text alignment in a future release of Windows, Windows 3.x applications must use multiline edit controls to achieve the same effect.

Additional query words: 

Keywords          : kbCtrl kbEditCtrl kbNTOS kbGrpUser kbWinOS 
Issue type        : kbinfo

Last Reviewed: December 26, 1998