CSS Text Rotation

[kirkilj]

Oxygen doesn't appear to support the CSS3 "transform" attribute. The latest versions of the big web browsers recently supported it as a custom attribute, such as "-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg)". Would such a feature be a candidate for a home-grown (Java) renderer that honors your Java rendering interfaces? It would be used for DITA table entries. Some table header cells use text rotated at 90 degrees. We did this for our FO PDF rendering pipeline on our server, and we were wondering how difficult it would be to do in-house work to provide this in Oxygen. We use an outputclass="rotate" to trigger this in our publishing pipeline.

From my reading of the API, it looks like the hooks are there. Would the table row resize appropriately? It also looks like there are separate interfaces for editing and rendering. Would we create a custom CSS function for this?

John

[Radu]

Hi John,

We do not have API support to allow you to define your own custom CSS function and then to have some kind of plugin to our rendering engine which would interpret that function and render the content appropriately. So you cannot implement text rotation on your side. But I added an improvement request for it and we will discuss implementing it in a future version.

Maybe in the meantime you could match in the CSS all elements having outputclass="rotate" and attach a small image to them in order for the tech writers to see that the attribute has been set to them.

Oxygen will never have the same implementation level of CSS as a Web browser does, for example let's say we implement text rotation and the entries look rotated 90 degrees. It will be quite hard for a tech writer to input text in those entries without constantly tilting his head. So we focus mostly on the task of editing the XML in an easy visual manner than on the task of looking as close as possible to the published output.

Regards,
Radu