How to align center align a block of text

[kompre]

Description

What is the most quarto way to center align a block of text like in the below example?

---
title: "How to align text in div?"
format: pdf

---

we the people


```{=latex}
\begin{center}
    DECLARE!
\end{center}
```


we are pretty cool

Ideally I would like to avoid the raw latex block if possible, also because it does not work for html output; I would rather enclose the text in :::, but i could not figure it out. I tried something like this

::: {layout="[-1,1,-1]" layout-align="center"}

DECLARE!

:::

but the text is rendered as left aligned in the middle block (as expected really). the option layout-align="center" does not seems to change anything

[mcanouil]

There is no "markdown" way.
Don't mix "position" and "justification/alignment". Layout is for position.

See:

• request: syntax for centering text jgm/pandoc#719

[kompre]

I stumbled upon this custom blocks in R Markdown that explain how to convert a div block in a any latex environment by adding data-latex="" as parameter.

For example my initial example could be written as:

---
title: "How to align text in div?"
format: pdf

---

we the people


::: {.center data-latex=""}

DECLARE!

:::

we are pretty cool

tex output

The div get rendered as follows in the tex

\begin{center}
DECLARE!

\end{center}

This should work also for html output with by either adding style="text-align: center;" or by defining a custom css like so:

.center {
    text-align: center;
}

As a very welcome bonus the content inside the div could be treated as regular quarto markdown (bolded, italics, shortcode, ...)

I prefer this approach because I feel is more in the spirit of quarto, and I don't have to duplicate content for the sake of different output.

I don't think I have found any mention of this in the official documentation, or at least in the pdf basics section which I am inclined to consult when to do stuff in pdf. Maybe would be worth adding a note to it?

[mcanouil]

That's Pandoc divs, see the documentation: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/markdown-basics.html#sec-divs-and-spans

Note that if you want a format agnostic approach, you can write a LUA filter to turn a div with a specific attribute into the right code for the format.