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.

HTML

<div>
  <p>- Foo Bar Zan -</p>
</div>

CSS

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

p {
  color:#fff;
  margin-top: 40px;
  text-align:center;
  padding-top:30px;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  letter-spacing:.9em;  <--- Here is the problem
}

I have create a codepen to show what I mean.
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.