Postcss-bidirection NPM

PostCSS Bidirection

PostCSS plugin that polyfill Bi-directional CSS proposal from W3C to suppot direction-sensitive rules, a.k.a Left-To-Right (LTR) and Right-To-Left (RTL) in all browsers.

Install

npm install --save-dev postcss-bidirection

Usage

Install postcss-bidirection via npm:

postcss([ require('postcss-bidirection') ])

See PostCSS docs for examples for your environment.

To check the layout change, in your HTML file, add attribute in your html tags

<html dir="rtl">

Or, in your js file, set document.dir = 'rtl' or document.dir = 'ltr'.

Examples

PostCSS Bidirection support syntax based on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/CSS_Guidelines

Text alignment example

Input

.foo {
  text-align: start;
}

Output

.foo {
  text-align: left;
}

html[dir="rtl"] .foo {
  text-align: right;
}

Padding Example

Input

.foo {
  padding-inline-start: 1px;
}

Output

.foo {
  padding-left: 1px;
}

html[dir="rtl"] .foo {
  padding-right: 1px;
}

Border Width Example

Input

.foo {
  border-inline-start-width: 1px;
}

Output

.foo {
  border-left-width: 1px;
}

html[dir="rtl"] .foo {
  border-right-width: 1px;
}

Absolute Positioning Example

Input

.foo {
  inset-inline-start: 1px;
}

Output

.foo {
  left: 1px;
}

html[dir="rtl"] .foo {
  right: 1px;
}

All supported syntax are listed below

left/right	begin/end
text alignment
text-align: left	text-align: start
text-align: right	text-align: end
float: left	float: start
float: right	float: end
clear: left	clear: start
clear: right	clear: end
padding, margin, border
padding-left	padding-inline-start
padding-right	padding-inline-end
border-left	border-inline-start
border-right	border-inline-end
border-left-color	border-inline-end-color
border-right-color	border-inline-start-color
border-left-style	border-inline-start-style
border-right-style	border-inline-end-style
border-left-width	border-inline-start-width
border-right-width	border-inline-end-width
border-top-left-radius	border-top-inline-start-radius
border-top-right-radius	border-top-inline-end-radius
border-bottom-left-radius	border-bottom-inline-start-radius
border-bottom-right-radius	border-bottom-inline-end-radius
margin-left	margin-inline-start
margin-right	margin-inline-end
absolute positioning
left	inset-inline-start
right	inset-inline-end
left	offset-inline-start (obsolete)
right	offset-inline-end (obsolete)

Options

postcss-bidirection accepts an options object.

const plugin = require('postcss-bidirection');
const opts = {
    ...
};
postcss([ plugin(opts) ]).process(input) ...

Custom Selectors

By default, postcss-bidirection prefixes generated CSS selectors with html[dir="rtl"] or html[dir="ltr"]. The buildSelector option allows you to override this behavior.

This callback gets called once for every selector of every rule that contains translated properties. If the rule has multiple selectors separated by commas, then it will be called multiple times for that rule.

It takes two arguments:

the original CSS selector of the rule that we are translating
The direction to which it is being translated. Can be rtl or ltr.

It should return a CSS selector string, which will be attached to the translated CSS rule.

For example, to drop html from generated selectors, pass a custom buildSelector function to the plugin.

const opts = {
  buildSelector = function(selector, direction) {
    return '[dir=" + direction + '"] ' + selector;
  }
};

let bidirection = require('postcss-bidirection');
postcss([ bidirection(opts) ]);

Input

.foo {
  text-align: start;
}

Now we have [dir="rtl"] instead of html[dir="rtl"] in the output:

.foo {
  text-align: left;
}

[dir="rtl"] .foo {
  text-align: right;
}

Debugging

Install postcss-debug

npm install -g postcss-debug

Then run postcss-debug with command

postcss-debug sample.css

References

Firefox OS / B2G OS

These CSS syntax are already in production in Mozilla's Firefox OS, which could be installed as an Android launcher. Once its started, open Settings > Language and choose an sample RTL Language to check the result.