Hey @mchowning 👋

As I have mentioned on Slack, @ceyhun experienced a problem with text alignment in pullquote block and I tried to find some nice/good fix, but couldn't find an easy one.

Let me try to explain where is the problem and what I have tried in order to fix it.

Problem:

Probably alignment isn't working because <p> is wrapped with <div> and here is the picture of all spans in example text.

Even if we have ParagraphSpan it seems that the problem is caused by HiddenHtmlBlock.

Solution:

The easiest solution is to call method: view.toggleFormatting(AztecTextFormat.FORMAT_ALIGN_CENTER);
but there is a problem how to determinate when to call the method as:

• we don't have a specific block type / tag
• method call can only happen after the text is set
• we need to know the type of alignment (to store it, but it will be ugly?)

Maybe I am missing something so if you have some ideas which can work, please be free to share, thanks!

Even if we have ParagraphSpan it seems that the problem is caused by HiddenHtmlBlock.

I bet you're right. Since HiddenHtmlSpan implements IAztecAlignmentSpan it's going to always ignore the View's gravity. I wonder if it would be possible to make it so that there is a HiddenHtmlSpan class that does not extend IAztecAlignmentSpan, which we could then use to allow the gravity to take effect. Similar to what I did with ParagraphSpan? My suspicion is that will not be an easy change though since it looks like there were specific needs that led to adding alignment to the HiddenHtmlSpan. 😞

The easiest solution is to call method: view.toggleFormatting(AztecTextFormat.FORMAT_ALIGN_CENTER);
but there is a problem how to determinate when to call the method...

Am I understanding correctly that if we were able to use view.toggleFormatting(...) for setting alignment on all blocks, then we wouldn't need to change anything to get alignment working for the pullquote block? I know I ran into a lot of issues trying to use that for paragraphs (I outlined some of those issues in my PR description), but we can always reassess that decision if we need to.

I have opened an AztecEditor-Android PR that I believe will address the alignment issue. That does not solve the problem of the placeholder not showing though, so that still needs some investigation. As you noted, the quote block also has the same problem with the placeholder, so I don't think that issue should block this PR.

You need to update this PR with the latest changes in develop, after the merge if the CI tests pass feel free to merge.

Closing as gutenberg PR is merged and gutenberg ref already updated by another merged PR.