Section 18.10. Text Direction

18.10. Text Direction

To accommodate languages that read right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the CSS Recommendation provides two properties that affect the direction of the flow of text.

direction

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Values:

     ltr | rtl | inherit 

Initial value:

     ltr 

Applies to:

All elements

Inherited:

Yes

The direction property affects the direction of text in a block-level element. It also changes the order of column layout, the behavior of text overflow, and margin alignment for justified text. The default is ltr (left to right) unless the browser has an internal style sheet for displaying text from right to left.

unicode-bidi

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Values:

     normal | embed | bidi-override | inherit 

Initial value:

     normal 

Applies to:

All elements

Inherited:

No

The unicode-bidi property is provided to take advantage of the directionality features in Unicode. Unicode and directionality are discussed in Chapter 6. Setting directionality falls outside the realm of the average web designer, but it is a useful feature for multilingual sites. For details on how these properties work, see the CSS 2.1 specification online at www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/. For more information on the internationalization efforts at the W3C, see www.w3c.org/International.