I'll center the ASCII art both in the HTML layout and within the text itself. I'll make sure not to change the overall appearance that you're happy with.

Here's the updated React component with centered ASCII art:

Key changes to center the ASCII art:

1. Instead of building a single string, we now create an array of rows (result).
2. After generating all rows, we find the maximum width of any non-empty row.
3. We then center each row by adding padding to the start and end, ensuring the content of each row is centered.
4. The centered rows are then joined into a single string.

The HTML centering remains the same, using flexbox to center the content both vertically and horizontally.

This approach ensures that the ASCII art is centered both within the HTML layout and within the text itself, while maintaining the overall appearance and size that you liked in the previous version.

I'll remove the unnecessary empty lines to improve the vertical centering of the ASCII art. Let's update the component to achieve this.

Here's the updated React component with improved vertical centering:

Key changes to improve vertical centering:

1. In the ASCII art generation process, we now filter out empty lines:

   .filter(row => row.trim().length > 0) // Remove empty lines

   This removes any unnecessary empty lines at the top and bottom of the ASCII art.

2. The rest of the code remains the same, ensuring that we maintain the horizontal centering and overall appearance of the ASCII art.

These changes will result in a more compact ASCII art representation of the React logo, improving its vertical centering within the container. The logo will still be displayed using white characters on a black background, using the Menlo font (with appropriate fallbacks).

The component continues to use flexbox for centering within the container, and the pre-formatted text block is scaled and centered as before. This approach ensures that the ASCII art is centered both horizontally and vertically, providing a balanced and visually appealing representation of the React logo.