textanchor

Textanchor is a term used in digital typography and vector graphics to describe the anchor point used to align text relative to a reference position. The concept is most commonly encountered in the SVG specification as the text-anchor attribute applied to text elements.

In SVG, text-anchor controls the horizontal alignment of text with respect to the x coordinate provided for a text element. The typical values are start, middle, and end. A value of start places the left edge of the text at the x position; middle centers the text at x; end aligns the right edge at x. The exact visual result also depends on the font metrics and other attributes such as transform or baseline alignment. When text is rendered along a path with textPath, the anchor behavior interacts with the path’s geometry and the start offset.

Outside SVG, many software libraries use a similar concept under the name TextAnchor or a related alignment type. These abstractions denote how text should be positioned relative to a reference point, commonly offering horizontal options like left/start, center/middle, and right/end, and sometimes vertical anchors such as top or bottom for two-dimensional alignment. The specifics—naming, allowed values, and combination anchors—vary by library or framework.

Note that anchor text, a related but distinct concept, refers to the visible clickable text of a hyperlink in web content. This term is not the same as the SVG attribute text-anchor, though both concern text placement and readability.