How to center SVG text vertically in IE9

Question

In order to align text vertically in SVG one has to use the dominant-baseline attribute. This has already been discussed on SO (Aligning text in SVG) and is par

Answer 1

You could try baseline-shift to see if that works in IE9:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<svg width="300" height="500" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
    <path d="M 10 100 h 290" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".5" />
    <text x="40" y="100" font-size="16" style="dominant-baseline: auto;">
        XXX dominant-baseline: auto; XXX
    </text>

    <path d="M 10 200 h 290" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".5" />
    <text x="40" y="200" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="15" style="dominant-baseline: central;">
        XXX dominant-baseline: central XXX
    </text>

    <path d="M 10 300 h 290" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".5" />
    <text x="40" y="300" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="15">
      <tspan style="baseline-shift:-30%;">
        XXX baseline-shift: -30% XXX
      </tspan>
    </text>
</svg>

Firefox doesn't seem to support baseline-shift though, but Webkit and Opera do.

Answer 2

This is a giant hack, but we can approximate the vertical middle position by taking the font size into account.

The specification defines central like that:

central

This identifies a computed baseline that is at the center of the EM box.

We can take an EM box of known font size and measure its bounding box to compute the center.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<svg width="300" height="300" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
    <path d="M 10 100 h 290" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".5" />
    <text id="default-text" x="20" y="100" font-size="5em">
        M
    </text>
    <script>
        window.onload = function() {
            var text = document.getElementById("default-text"),
                bbox = text.getBBox(),
                actualHeight = (100 - bbox.y),
                fontSize = parseInt(window.getComputedStyle(text)["fontSize"]),
                offsetY = (actualHeight / 2) - (bbox.height - fontSize);

            text.setAttribute("transform", "translate(0, " + offsetY + ")");
        }
    </script>

    <path   d="M 10 200 h 290" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".5" />
    <text   id="reference-text" x="20" y="200" font-size="5em"
            style="dominant-baseline: central;">
        M
    </text>
</svg>

Obviously, the code can be much cleaner, but this is just a proof-of-concept.

Answer 3

One way to accomplish this in IE is to set the position related to the size of the font:

<text font-size="WHATEVER YOU WANT" text-anchor="middle" "dy"="-.4em"> M </text>

Setting the "dy" attribute will shift the text up (if value is negative) or down (if value is positive). Setting the "text-anchor" attribute centers the text on the x axis just fine in IE. Although this might hackish, but so is IE's support of SVG!