Rotating text with tex4ht

Question

i want to rotate text within a table, which works fine when generating a pdf document, but not when using tex4ht. Is there a way to fix this?

MWE:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{mwe}

\begin{document}

\rotatebox{90}{text}

\end{document}

Answer 1

We can use the CSS transform property together with rotate() function to rotate boxes in HTML. You can try the following configuration file graphicx.4ht:

% graphicx.4ht (2017-10-21-16:16), generated from tex4ht-4ht.tex
% Copyright 2003-2009 Eitan M. Gurari
% Copyright 2009-2017 TeX Users Group
%
% This work may be distributed and/or modified under the
% conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either
% version 1.3c of this license or (at your option) any
% later version. The latest version of this license is in
%   http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt
% and version 1.3c or later is part of all distributions
% of LaTeX version 2005/12/01 or later.
%
% This work has the LPPL maintenance status "maintained".
%
% The Current Maintainer of this work
% is the TeX4ht Project <http://tug.org/tex4ht>.
%
% If you modify this program, changing the
% version identification would be appreciated.
\immediate\write-1{version 2017-10-21-16:16}

   \let\Gin:esetsize\Gin@esetsize
\def\Gin@esetsize{%
   \ifx \Gin@ewidth\Gin@exclamation
      \let\Gin:ewidth\Gin@ewidth
   \else
      \setlength\tmp:dim\Gin@ewidth
      \edef\Gin:ewidth{\the\tmp:dim}%
   \fi
   \ifx \Gin@eheight\Gin@exclamation
      \let\Gin:eheight\Gin@eheight
   \else
      \setlength\tmp:dim\Gin@eheight
      \edef\Gin:eheight{\the\tmp:dim}%
   \fi
   \Gin:esetsize
}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.png}{bmp}{.xbb}{}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.jpg}{bmp}{.xbb}{}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.gif}{bmp}{.xbb}{}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.pdf}{bmp}{.xbb}{}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.svg}{bmp}{.xbb}{}

\NewConfigure{rotatebox}{2}
\pend:def\Grot@box{\a:rotatebox}
\append:def\Grot@box{\b:rotatebox}

\Configure{rotatebox}{\HCode{<span class="rotatebox" style="transform: rotate(-\Grot@angle deg);">}}{\HCode{</span>}}
\Css{.rotatebox{
  display: inline-block;}}

\Hinput{graphicx}
\endinput

The important code is the following:

\NewConfigure{rotatebox}{2}
\pend:def\Grot@box{\a:rotatebox}
\append:def\Grot@box{\b:rotatebox}

\Configure{rotatebox}{\HCode{<span class="rotatebox" style="transform: rotate(-\Grot@angle deg);">}}{\HCode{</span>}}
\Css{.rotatebox{
  display: inline-block;}}

A new tex4ht configuration, rotatebox has been declared and the configuration hooks have been inserted to the \Grot@box command, which is used to draw the rotated box. The hooks are then configured to insert the <span class="rotatebox"> element with style="transform: rotate(-\Grot@angle deg);" CSS style. This style enables the rotation. The \Grot@angle command contains the rotation angle, which must be negative for some reason in the CSS.

The following TeX code:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{mwe}

\begin{document}

normal text
\rotatebox{90}{text}
\rotatebox{190}{some longer text}
normal text continues

\end{document}

will be rendered in this way in HTML:

In PDF, it looks a bit different:

The problem is that things started to go wrong when I tried to use a different point of rotation than the center, so I think this is the best we can get.

Edit:

If your Epub viewer doesn't support rotations (just a proof of the poor support ebooks still receive), you can convert the rotated text to an image. Try the following config file:

\Preamble{xhtml,svg}
\Configure{rotatebox}{\Picture+{}}{\EndPicture}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble

The result: