Rotate and translate

Question

I'm having some problems rotating and positioning a line of text. Now it's just position that works. The rotation also works, but only if i disable the positioning.

CSS:

#rotatedtext {
    transform-origin: left;
    transform: rotate(90deg);
    transform: translate(50%, 50%);
}

The html is just plain text.

Answer 1

The reason is because you are using the transform property twice. Due to CSS rules with the cascade, the last declaration wins if they have the same specificity. As both transform declarations are in the same rule set, this is the case.

What it is doing is this:

1. rotate the text 90 degrees. Ok.
2. translate 50% by 50%. Ok, this is same property as step one, so do this step and ignore step 1.

See http://jsfiddle.net/Lx76Y/ and open it in the debugger to see the first declaration overwritten

As the translate is overwriting the rotate, you have to combine them in the same declaration instead: http://jsfiddle.net/Lx76Y/1/

To do this you use a space separated list of transforms:

#rotatedtext {
    transform-origin: left;
    transform: translate(50%, 50%) rotate(90deg) ;
}

Remember that they are specified in a chain, so the translate is applied first, then the rotate after that.