text-orientation

The text-orientation CSS property sets the orientation of the text characters in a line. It only affects text in vertical mode (when writing-mode is not horizontal-tb). It is useful for controlling the display of languages that use vertical script, and also for making vertical table headers.

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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;

The text-orientation property is specified as a single keyword from the list below.

Values

mixed

Rotates the characters of horizontal scripts 90° clockwise. Lays out the characters of vertical scripts naturally. Default value.

upright

Lays out the characters of horizontal scripts naturally (upright), as well as the glyphs for vertical scripts. Note that this keyword causes all characters to be considered as left-to-right: the used value of direction is forced to be ltr.

sideways

Causes characters to be laid out as they would be horizontally, but with the whole line rotated 90° clockwise.

sideways-right

An alias to sideways that is kept for compatibility purposes.

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 definition

Formal syntax

mixed | upright | sideways

Examples

HTML

<p>Lorem ipsum dolet semper quisquam.</p>

CSS

p {
  writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  text-orientation: upright;
}

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• The other vertical-script related CSS properties: writing-mode, text-combine-upright, and unicode-bidi.
• CSS Logical properties
• Styling vertical text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian)
• Extensive browsers support test results: https://w3c.github.io/i18n-tests/results/horizontal-in-vertical.html#text_orientation