RE: Use Cases for Rotation in CSS

Ambrose Li wrote:
> Date: Sat, November 03, 2007 9:32 am
> To: "Alan Gresley" <alan1@azzurum.com>
> Cc: www-style@w3.org,  "John Oyler" <johnoyler.css@gmail.com>
> 
> On 02/11/2007, Ambrose Li <ambrose.li@gmail.com> wrote:
> > No! Uppercase might be ok, but reading lowercase like this would
> > be very painful, not to mention that this makes the label much taller
> > than is necessary.
> 
> Also, what if the text in question is in Arabic? You can't split the label
> letter by letter in such a script at all. For Arabic you *must* rotate the
> label.
> 
> -- 
> cheers,
> -ambrose

This thread is about CSS rotation isn't it, about rotating an element or am I missing something here. My answer was in reply to this use case.

"By far the most useful will be for certain tables, where labeling columns will require text rotated into a vertical orientation"

By rotating text (maybe a poor choice in words) in this use case, you are rotating a element with anonymous inline boxes by either 90 degrees or 270 degrees. This is indeed arbitrary CSS rotation as I understand it and then there is the CSS3 text layout module [1] [2]. A use case on this page [3] shows both Latin and Arabic text with a text-orientation of upright which below example shows.

T
a
b
l
e

and from what I can see from the page would be styled

th {text-orientation-vertical:upright}

Values of left and right would show Latin and Arabic at an angle of 270 degrees or 90 degrees. All three variation shows Japaneses glyphs the same way, vertical. So if both say English and Japanese was use in the same table header. What type of html construct would be used with rotating the English text along with using vertical Japanese text? Not that I know how to construct the same with a vertical text layout for table headers.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work#text-layout
[2] http://osdir.com/ml/web.css.general/2004-10/msg00004.html
[3] http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/vertical-text/diagrams/bidi-upright.svg

Kind regards, Alan

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 16:15:53 UTC