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Glossary

What is page-progression-direction (RTL books)?

Updated:

page-progression-direction is an attribute of the EPUB spine (ltr, rtl or default) that tells the reader in which direction pages turn. Arabic, Hebrew and Persian books use rtl, and so do Japanese books set vertically.

Why it matters when you convert a PDF to EPUB

A right-to-left PDF also has its lines and columns ordered right to left, so the converter must keep the reading order, set dc:language and the dir attribute, and declare the page direction, or the book opens from the wrong end.

How EpubCC handles it: when the detected language is Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, the spine gets page-progression-direction="rtl" and every chapter gets dir="rtl". The engine also sorts right-to-left words correctly, because PDFium returns Arabic letters in visual order, and normalises Arabic presentation forms to ordinary letters. The Arabic case shows the result on a real PDF.

Related terms

EPUBCheck messages about this

  • CSS-001 The "…" property must not be included in an EPUB Style Sheet.

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FAQ

What is page-progression-direction (RTL books)?

page-progression-direction is an attribute of the EPUB spine (ltr, rtl or default) that tells the reader in which direction pages turn. Arabic, Hebrew and Persian books use rtl, and so do Japanese books set vertically.