text-combine-upright

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2022.

The text-combine-upright CSS property sets the combination of characters into the space of a single character. If the combined text is wider than 1em, the user agent must fit the contents within 1em. The resulting composition is treated as a single upright glyph for layout and decoration. This property only has an effect in vertical writing modes.

This is used to produce an effect that is known as tate-chū-yoko 縦中横 in Japanese, or as 橫向文字 in Chinese.

Try it

Syntax

css
/* Keyword values */
text-combine-upright: none;
text-combine-upright: all;

/* Global values */
text-combine-upright: inherit;
text-combine-upright: initial;
text-combine-upright: revert;
text-combine-upright: revert-layer;
text-combine-upright: unset;

Values

none

There is no special processing.

all

Attempts to typeset all consecutive characters within the box horizontally, such that they take up the space of a single character within the vertical line of the box.

Note: The CSS writing modes module defines a digits <integer> value for the text-combine-upright property to display two to four consecutive ASCII digits (U+0030–U+0039) such that it takes up the space of a single character within the vertical line box, however, this is not supported in any browsers.

Formal definition

Initial valuenone
Applies tonon-replaced inline elements
Inheritedyes
Computed valuespecified keyword, plus integer if 'digits'
Animation typeNot animatable

Formal syntax

text-combine-upright = 
  none                         |
  all                          |
  [ digits <integer [2,4]>? ]

Examples

Using 'all' with horizontal text

The all value requires markup around every piece of horizontal text, but it is currently supported by more browsers than the digits value.

HTML

html
<p lang="zh-Hant">
  民國<span class="num">105</span>年<span class="num">4</span>月<span
    class="num"
    >29</span
  >日
</p>

CSS

css
html {
  writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  font: 24px serif;
}
.num {
  text-combine-upright: all;
}

Results

Specifications

Specification
CSS Writing Modes Level 4
# text-combine-upright

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also