Support RTL SVG text anchoring#2755
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This was referenced Apr 22, 2026
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What changed
SVG text now passes
direction="ltr"/direction="rtl"to the Pango text layout used for SVG text drawing.text-anchorhandling also now follows the SVG inline-base direction:startkeeps the current behavior and extends right fromx.starttreatsxas the right edge and extends left.endtreatsxas the left edge and extends right.This is a small step toward #106 and is stacked on #2754.
Why
SVG 2 defines the
directionproperty as the inline-base direction for SVG text. It determines the start/end points used bytext-anchor, and it can affect text positioning when bidi properties are involved:https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/text.html#DirectionProperty
Before this change, SVG direction attributes were cascaded but ignored when building the text layout style, so SVG text anchoring stayed effectively LTR.
Visual proof
Source SVG:
Rendered PNG:
The HTML wrapper used to render the proof is:
Scope
This does not implement full RTL/bidi support. In particular, it does not solve the SVG 2 mapping of per-character
x,y,dx,dy, androtatelists onto shaped visual glyph clusters after bidi reordering.Tests