Does Tailwind CSS support `direction: rtl` and Text Direction?

Updated

1 min read

Tailwind CSS does support RTL modifiers, but Tailwind CSS does not support the direction CSS property currently.

There are also discussions about adding Tailwind classes to support writing-mode and text-orientation.

You can use the RTL modifiers like so:

html<div dir="rtl">
    <div className="ltr:pl-4 rtl:pr-4">
        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
    </div>
</div>

However, when building things like an interactive, hoverable star rating using Tailwind CSS, the lack of a direction property can be a small inconvenience.

Luckily, it's simple enough to add your own utility classes. Here are some helpful additional utility classes you can copy to your Tailwind project:

css.direction-rtl {
    direction: rtl;
}

.direction-ltr {
    direction: ltr;
}

/** As suggested by M0hammedImran on Github */
.text-sideways {
    text-orientation: sideways;
}

.text-upright {
    text-orientation: upright;
}

.text-mixed {
    text-orientation: mixed;
}

.text-sideways-right {
    text-orientation: sideways-right;
}

.text-glyph {
    text-orientation: use-glyph-orientation;
}

.writing-vertical-lr {
    writing-mode: vertical-lr;
}

.writing-vertical-rl {
    writing-mode: vertical-rl;
}

.writing-horizontal-tb {
    writing-mode: horizontal-tb;
}

Hopefully Tailwind CSS can add these text direction and direction properties in the future.

Ryan Chiang

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Ryan Chiang

Hello, I'm Ryan. I build things and write about them. This is my blog of my learnings, tutorials, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
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