CSS Vertical Text

Many people have written about the potential for vertical text in CSS so I wanted to try it out for myself. By using the technique described below I was able to achieve this effect:

*Disclaimer: This doesn’t work in old Opera versions, but does work in Opera 10.5. This also works in IE6+, FF, and Webkit based browsers, so that is pretty encompassing.

Here is the basic markup:

<p>CSS Vertical Text</p>


I wanted to try to do my best to exclude IE browser checks and conditional checks. So this example handles all browsers mentioned previously with a single CSS block:

p.css-vertical-text {
	color:#333;
	border:0px solid red;
	writing-mode:tb-rl;
	-webkit-transform:rotate(90deg);
	-moz-transform:rotate(90deg);
	-o-transform: rotate(90deg);
	white-space:nowrap;
	display:block;
	bottom:0;
	width:20px;
	height:20px;
	font-family: ‘Trebuchet MS’, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size:24px;
	font-weight:normal;
	text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px #333;
}

Also, if I can stay away from IE filters I like too, but it’s worth mentioning that if you have an specific rotation, you have to use the IE filter:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);

Where 0, 1, 2, 3 correlate to 0, 90, 180, and 270 respectively.

So I tried to keep this one simple, but lining everything up in different browsers can be a pain because of the way each browser interprets the spacing.

Information for this post was pulled from the following places:

http://www.thecssninja.com/css/real-text-rotation-with-css

http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/css-text-rotation

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 2:18 am and is filed under CSS, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.