Vertical Text Direction

Question

I have been trying text to go in a vertical direction like we can do in ms-word tables but so far I have only been able to do THIS... which I am not happy with because it's a box rotated... Isn't there a way to have actual vertical direction text?

I only set the rotation to 305 degrees in the demo which doesn't make the text vertical. 270deg will but I only made the demo to show rotation.

Answer 1

I've manage to have a working solution with this :

(I have a title within a middleItem class div)

.middleItem > .title{
    width: 5px;
    height: auto;
    word-break:break-all;
    font-size: 150%;
}

Answer 2

I was searching for an actual vertical text and not the rotated text in HTML as shown below. So I could achieve it by using the following method.

HTML:-

<p class="vericaltext">
Hi This is Vertical Text!
</p>

CSS:-

.vericaltext{
    width:1px;
    word-wrap: break-word;
    font-family: monospace; /* this is just for good looks */
}

JSFiddle! Demo.

Update:- If you need the whitespaces to be displayed, then add the following property to your css.

white-space: pre;

So, the css class shall be

.vericaltext{
    width:1px;
    word-wrap: break-word;
    font-family: monospace; /* this is just for good looks */
    white-space: pre;/* this is for displaying whitespaces */
}

JSFiddle! Demo With Whitespace

Update 2 (28-JUN-2015)

Since white-space: pre; doesnt seem to work (for this specific use) on Firefox(as of now), just change that line to

white-space: pre-wrap;

So, the css class shall be

.vericaltext{
    width:1px;
    word-wrap: break-word;
    font-family: monospace; /* this is just for good looks */
    white-space:pre-wrap; /* this is for displaying whitespaces including Moz-FF.*/
}

JsFiddle Demo FF Compatible.

Answer 3

To display text in vertical (Bottom-top) we can simply use:

writing-mode: vertical-lr; 

transform: rotate(180deg);

#myDiv{
text-align: center;
}

#mySpan{
writing-mode: vertical-lr; 
transform: rotate(180deg);
}

<div id="myDiv"> 

<span id="mySpan"> Here We gooooo !!! </span>

</div>

Note we can add this to ensure Browser Compatibility:

-webkit-transform: rotate(180deg);   
-moz-transform: rotate(180deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(180deg);
-o-transform: rotate(180deg);
transform: rotate(180deg);

we can also read more about writing-mode property here on Mozilla docs.

Answer 4

This is a bit hacky but cross browser solution which requires no css

<div>
    <div>h</div>
    <div>e</div>
    <div>l</div>
    <div>l</div>
    <div>o</div>
<div>

Answer 5

rotation, like you did, is the way to go - but note that not all browsers support that. if you wan't to get a cross-browser solution, you'll have to generate pictures for that.

Answer 6

Here is an example of some SVG code I used to get three lines of vertical text into a table column heading. Other angles are possible with a bit of tweaking. I believe most browsers support SVG these days.

<svg height="150" width="40">
  <text font-weight="bold" x="-150" y="10" transform="rotate(-90 0 0)">Jane Doe</text>
  <text x="-150" y="25" transform="rotate(-90 0 0)">0/0&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;0/0</text>
  <text x="-150" y="40" transform="rotate(-90 0 0)">2015-06-06</text>
  Sorry, your browser does not support inline SVG.
</svg>