[css3-writing-modes] rotate-left value of text-orientation

I think the following text from the writing modes draft is very unclear. I have no clue how to implement this value.

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rotate-left
In vertical writing modes, this causes text to be set as if in a horizontal layout (using horizontal glyph variants and metrics), but rotated 90° counter-clockwise. This value puts the element in ahorizontal typographic mode.
If set on a non-replaced inline whose parent is not ‘rotate-left’, this forces ‘isolate’ to be added to the computed value of ‘unicode-bidi’. Layout of text is exactly as for ‘rotate-right’ except that the entire text content and baseline table of the element is mirrored: each box of the inline is mirrored around a vertical axis such that its content box does not move. (However the contents of atomic inlines are not mirrored; only their alignment is changed.) Similarly, if a child of the element has a ‘text-orientation’ value other than ‘rotate-left’, an analogous transformation is applied.

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(1) Are borders, backgrounds and box shadows left alone, i.e., are they identical regardless of whether the text-orientation is rotate-left vs. rotate-right, i.e., the start border side and the end border sides are still the same, and you still leave the end side open if you span multiple lines?

(2) If you span multiple lines and your text is "Abcdef" with a split such that you have "Abc" and "def", then you don't see "def" on the first line, correct?  You would rotate "Abc" on line #1 and then rotate "def" on line #2?  In other words, you don't actually do line breaking going backwards through the text?

I have some other questions but i'll just start with those two.  Basically I want to verify that this rotation is applied per-box, and that the contents of each box on a line don't change if you specify rotate-left instead of rotate-right.

dave
(hyatt@apple.com)

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 20:05:56 UTC