Letter-spacing wrong text center alignment

Question

I have noticed a odd behavior in using letter-spacing and text-align: center together. Increasing the space, bring the text to be closer to the left margin of the element.

div {
  width: 400px;
  height: 200px;
  background-color: #3b0d3b;
  text-align: center;
  margin: auto;
}

p {
  color: #fff;
  margin-top: 40px;
  text-align: center;
  padding-top: 10px;
  font-size: 1.2em;
}

.spacing {
  letter-spacing:.4em; /* This property is the problem */
}

.spacing-large {
  letter-spacing:.9em; /* This property is the problem */
}

<div>
  <p>- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
  <p class="spacing">- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
  <p class="spacing-large">- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
</div>

I spot the same behavior on last Firefox and Chrome. Is there a way to fix this issue?

Answer 1

It seems you need to indent the text by the same amount as the letter-spacing. The first letter does not have the spacing applied to the left side

div {
  width: 400px;
  height: 400px;
  background-color: #3b0d3b;
  text-align: center;
  margin: auto;
}

p {
  color: #fff;
  background: black;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
}

.spacing {
  letter-spacing: .4em;
}

.spacing-large {
  letter-spacing: 0.9em;
  text-align: center;
  text-indent: 0.9em;
}

<div>
  <p>- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
  <p class="spacing">- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
  <p class="spacing-large">- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
</div>

The logical explanation I came up with is - since it is the first letter, spacing on the left side will not apply.