How do I center text in a Horizontal StackLayout?

Question

I have this StackLayout that I used to create a Navigation Bar in XAML. This Horizontal StackLayout contains a button and label. The problem is that the text is not exactly centered and I cant seem to get it perfectly in the middle. Can someone please help me center this text in this StackLayout? I'm using Xamarin by the way.

<!-- Nav Bar-->
<StackLayout Orientation="Horizontal" HeightRequest="45" BackgroundColor="{StaticResource Teal}">
  <StackLayout.Padding>
    <OnPlatform x:TypeArguments="Thickness"
                iOS="10,0,0,0"
                Android="0,0,0,0"
                WinPhone="0,0,0,0" />
  </StackLayout.Padding>
  <Button x:Name="btnBack" HorizontalOptions="Start" TextColor="White" BackgroundColor="Transparent"
          Command="{Binding BackCommand}" IsVisible="{Binding CanGoBack}" />
  <Label HorizontalOptions="CenterAndExpand" VerticalOptions="Center" TextColor="White" FontSize="24" Text="{Binding TitleBarText}" LineBreakMode="TailTruncation" />
</StackLayout>

As you can see the App Title is not centered...

Answer 1

The StackLayout isn't great when you want to put a View in a specific location. It's good when you have a number of views, and you want them all to appear in a reasonable way.

When you want something pixel perfect, there are two great layouts:

• AbsoluteLayout
• RelativeLayout

To your specific issue, I would say to use an AbsoluteLayout because it's super easy to center a Label with that. For this solution, I changed your Nav Bar's StackLayout to an AbsoluteLayout and added the layout parameters in code behind.

The XAML:

<AbsoluteLayout x:Name="NavBarLayout" HeightRequest="45" BackgroundColor="Aqua">
     <Button x:Name="btnBack" TextColor="White" FontSize="40" BackgroundColor="Transparent" Text="&lt;" />
     <Label x:Name="labelTitle" TextColor="White" FontSize="24" Text="Hello World!" YAlign="Center" XAlign="Center" LineBreakMode="TailTruncation" />
</AbsoluteLayout>

The code behind:

public MyPage ()
    {
        InitializeComponent ();

        NavBarLayout.Children.Add (
            btnBack,
            // Adds the Button on the top left corner, with 10% of the navbar's width and 100% height
            new Rectangle(0, 0, 0.1, 1),
            // The proportional flags tell the layout to scale the value using [0, 1] -> [0%, 100%]
            AbsoluteLayoutFlags.HeightProportional | AbsoluteLayoutFlags.WidthProportional
        );

        NavBarLayout.Children.Add(
            labelTitle,
            // Using 0.5 will center it and the layout takes the size of the element into account
            // 0.5 will center, 1 will right align
            // Adds in the center, with 90% of the navbar's width and 100% of height
            new Rectangle(0.5, 0.5, 0.9, 1),
            AbsoluteLayoutFlags.All
        );
    }