[Framers] middle (vertical) alignment in table cell ?

[Monique Semp]

> I cannot seem to get the text to be precisely vertically centered. It’s *almost* centered, and clearly is not Top, Bottom, or As Is. But *almost* centered is *not* centered. (No, users probably won’t notice. But I notice, and our design person has noticed and asked me to fix it.)

SOLVED (sorta), with the help of off-list replies and lots of experimentation, so I'd like to summarize.

I’ve concluded that FrameMaker is absolutely centering the text: it's apparently creating equal space above the ascender (to the cell top) and below the descender (to the cell bottom), which certainly means that the text is centered. But… we humans (or at least, I) tend to focus on the cap height, and expect that to be centered in the cell. And so the vertical centering *appears* off.

(I sure wish that I could confirm that this is exactly what FrameMaker is doing, but I cannot find it via typical google. Perhaps this is part of the deep web, but perhaps it’s that Adobe doesn’t publicize this info.)

So now the question is, do I stick with the accurate placement that FrameMaker produces or do I manually adjust things so that the cap height (or some other specific typography part ?) *appears* centered in the cell? I’m not sure yet, and I’ve tossed that question back to the picky designer :-).

And to complete the thought, such manual fudging can be done many ways: adding “spacer” blocks to the Reference Page and then applying them as the paragraph style’s Frame Above (and therefore not needing to use a table cell at all); changing the paragraph style’s space above/below; changing the table cell’s margins; and likely other solutions. And they’d all need to be adjusted if the font face or size changed.

Always something new to learn in FrameMaker, that’s for sure!
-Monique