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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T20:22:17+00:00

I want to set the text direction for some cells in a TextTable so

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I want to set the text direction for some cells in a TextTable so that they are vertical (i.e., the text is landscape instead of portrait).
You can do this in Writer by selecting the cell(s), and going to:
Table – Text Properties – Text Flow – Text Direction

However, I cannot figure out how to do this through the API. I tried using CharRotation, but it does not behave the right way. CharRotation simply takes the text, and rotates it (without adjusting any formatting). The text I am dealing with is formatted by tab stops, and does not behave correctly when rotated this way.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I finally figured this out after all these months!

    You have to set the “WritingMode” property for the cell. In C#:

    XCell cell = table.getCellByName(cellName);
((XPropertySet)cell).setPropertyValue("WritingMode", new Any((short) 
WritingMode.TB_RL));

    I haven’t tried it in python yet, but I suppose it would be something like this:

    cell = table.getCellByName(cellName)
cell.WritingMode = 2

    If you’re using a statically typed language, make sure you cast it to a short. Doing typeof(WritingMode) won’t work, for some odd reason.

    See this issue in the OOo bug tracker.

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