StoryMap Text Alignment Options?

[MatthewHowland]

Hello,

Will text alignment options be added to StoryMaps? e.g., right align, center text, justify, etc. I am working on a StoryMap in Arabic and the lack of text alignment options causes the text to look a bit unnatural.

Thank You,

Matt Howland

[OwenGeo]

Hi Matthew -- ArcGIS StoryMaps handles the display of left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) languages automatically. We don't want this to be something you need to set manually with text alignment controls for each text block.

The story is behaving as expected. If the reader's browser (or ArcGIS profile, if the reader is logged in) is set to Arabic or Hebrew, then the story text and other page controls will be displayed as RTL. But if the reader's browser/profile are set to English or another LTR language, then the story text (even if it is written in Arabic or Hebrew) and page controls will be shown as LTR. We confirmed with our internationalization and translation team experts that this is the desired behavior according to software internationalization best practices.

[AmyWork3]

Hi, I also have this same question. I would like to center text on a text block, similar to what can be done in any document program (e.g. Word). So Align Left, Align Center, Align Right or Justify. I do not see the ability to align the text in something other than the default, Align Left. 

Can I specify how I would like to text aligned in StoryMaps?

[OwenGeo]

Hi Amy -- Thanks for your feedback. If you have a specific uses in mind for any of these tools, please provide some detail on how they would bring value to your story so we can understand how you'd like to use them. We are open to considering them for future releases.

You don't see some of the typical formatting options from word processing apps because a story map is not the same thing as a Word doc or Google doc. Even though there are web tools to create all these things, the end products are very different. A story map is a dynamic web page that needs to look good and work well on a wide variety of screen sizes, whereas documents contain content arranged in a specific way on a known page size.

Our research shows that center-aligned and justified text is generally very poor for readability on web pages. As mentioned above, left- or right-aligning text is handled automatically based on language settings. For these reasons, we haven't prioritized adding these tools, but there may be valid uses we haven't yet considered. Please let us know how they'd be valuable to you.

[AmyWork3]

Thanks for the feedback. I've been working with some students / researchers who would like the option to center some text in certain text boxes. This is primarily with the main text boxes, not the sidecar content. Specifically they would like to center some of their references, acknowledgements, and contact information at the bottom of the StoryMap.

[OwenGeo]

Thanks for the information, Amy! That's helpful.

Have you seen the Credits section that's available to include at the end of a story? That already has centered reference items...

[AndrewRitchie]

Hi Owen, 

What about for inline 'call to action' buttons? I have a user wanting options to:

a) Centre text inside the button

b) Centre the button on the page.

c) Change the size of the button - (where the text length may not impart the desired importance, it'd be good to set a button to centred, and 50% page width, as an example only)

I was a bit surprised to find I couldn't do any of these. (or at least didn't manage to find the options 🙂

An alternative may be to allow links on images.

Cheers,

Andrew

[OwenGeo]

@AndrewRitchie -- We have more button styles and options on our list, and we should be working on them sometime in Q2. I'll add the items you mentioned above to our requirements for consideration.

[FermínVargas]

Hi Owen, 

The option to justify text is very important to print pdf documents for example.

If there is some way to at least justify the pdf text before printing that might be great.

[Boyang_Wang]

I vote that justify alignment is very important. Many of us prefer it to left alignment just because of the look of it. What is your thought on this @OwenGeo?