text-orientation

The text-orientation CSS property defines the orientation of the text in a line. This property only has an effect in vertical mode, that is when writing-mode is not horizontal-tb. It is useful to control the display of writing in languages using vertical script, but also to deal with vertical table headers.

Initial value	mixed
Applies to	all elements, except table row groups, rows, column groups, and columns
Inherited	yes
Media	visual
Computed value	as specified
Animation type	discrete
Canonical order	the unique non-ambiguous order defined by the formal grammar

Syntax

/* Keyword values */
text-orientation: mixed;
text-orientation: upright;
text-orientation: sideways-right;
text-orientation: sideways;
text-orientation: use-glyph-orientation;

/* Global values */
text-orientation: inherit;
text-orientation: initial;
text-orientation: unset;

Values

mixed

This keyword leads to have characters for horizontal-only scripts being turned 90°, while the glyphs for vertical scripts are laid out naturally.

upright

This keyword leads to have characters for horizontal-only scripts to be laid out naturally (upright), as well as the glyphs for vertical scripts. Note that this keyword lead all characters to be considered as ltr: the used value of direction is ltr, whatever the user could try to set it to.

sideways

This keyword leads to have characters laid out like if they were laid out horizontally, but with the whole line rotated 90° to the right if writing-mode is vertical-rl or to the left, if it is vertical-lr.

sideways-right

An alias to sideways that is kept for compatibility purpose.

use-glyph-orientation

On SVG elements, this keyword leads to use the value of the deprecated SVG properties glyph-orientation-vertical and glyph-orientation-horizontal.

Formal syntax

mixed | upright | sideways

Examples

.myText {
  writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  text-orientation: sideways-right;
}  

Specification

Specification	Status	Comment
CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3 The definition of 'text-orientation' in that specification.	Candidate Recommendation	Initial definition

Browser compatibility

[1] Available since Gecko 38 (Firefox 38.0 / Thunderbird 38.0 / SeaMonkey 2.35), but behind the preference layout.css.vertical-text.enabled, then set to false by default. The preference has been removed in Gecko 51 (Firefox 51.0 / Thunderbird 51.0 / SeaMonkey 2.48) and this property cannot be disabled anymore since this version.

[2] sideways-right has been made an alias of sideways.

See also

• The other vertical-script related CSS properties: writing-mode, text-combine-upright, and unicode-bidi.