Summary
Proposal owner: Miklos Vajna
Proposal short name: Bottom to top, left to right writing direction
Rationale
Use cases:
Users sometimes want to have a text direction which is similar to latin text
(left to right, then top to bottom), but rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
Also, this improves consistency, as doing the same in the clockwise direction
is already possible (the top to bottom, right to left direction is used for
e.g. Japanese text).
Alternatives considered:
It is possible to rotate characters at a span level, but that only gives
similar result as long as the content fits a single line.
Requested changes to the ODF Standard
Text changes/additions (compared to ODF 1.2):
20.394.2 <style:graphic-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
20.394.3 <style:page-layout-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
20.394.4 <style:paragraph-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
20.394.5 <style:section-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
20.394.6 <style:table-cell-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
20.394.7 <style:table-properties> (existing section)
Append to the end of style:writing-mode attribute value list: bt-lr.
Schema changes/additions:
<rng:define name="common-writing-mode-attlist">
<rng:optional>
<rng:attribute name="style:writing-mode">
<rng:choice>
<rng:value>lr-tb</rng:value>
<rng:value>rl-tb</rng:value>
<rng:value>tb-rl</rng:value>
<rng:value>tb-lr</rng:value>
<rng:value>lr</rng:value>
<rng:value>rl</rng:value>
<rng:value>tb</rng:value>
<rng:value>page</rng:value>
<rng:value>bt-lr</rng:value>
</rng:choice>
</rng:attribute>
</rng:optional>
</rng:define>
In other words, allow bt-lr as a new value of the style:writing-mode
attribute.
Impacts
Conformance:
This proposal will not add any mandatory features or behaviors.
Backwards compatibility:
This change will not impact existing ODF processors, the usage of the new
attribute value is optional.
Accessibility impact:
This change will not impact accessibility.
Interoperability:
OOXML's wordprocessingML has a <w:textDirection w:val="btLr"/> markup to
describe the same, this proposal allows roundtripping that feature in ODF.
LibreOffice 6.3 implements this layout feature in its ODF extension namespace.