Why your text in illustrator never looks centred (and how to fix it) You've done this a hundred times. Put text inside a circle. Select both. Click Align Centre. And yet... there's more space at the top than the bottom. It looks off. So you manually nudge it down a pixel or two until it *feels* right. I did this for YEARS before I learnt the actual fix. Here's what's happening: Illustrator's normal alignment centres the text *box*, not the actual letters. Your letters have ascenders and descende