CanvasRenderingContext2D: direction property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The CanvasRenderingContext2D.direction property of the Canvas 2D API specifies the current text direction used to draw text.

Value

Possible values:

"ltr": The text direction is left-to-right.
"rtl": The text direction is right-to-left.
"inherit": The text direction is inherited from the <canvas> element or the Document as appropriate. Default value.

The default value is "inherit".

Examples

Changing text direction

This example draws two pieces of text. The first one is left-to-right, and the second is right-to-left. Note that "Hi!" in ltr becomes "!Hi" in rtl.

HTML

html

<canvas id="canvas"></canvas>

JavaScript

const canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

ctx.font = "48px serif";
ctx.fillText("Hi!", 150, 50);
ctx.direction = "rtl";
ctx.fillText("Hi!", 150, 130);

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # dom-context-2d-direction-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser