East Asian vertical text

Hey @Zhen_Fan ,
Thank you for your feedback! We will pass it along to our team for consideration. Do not also forget to vote your idea (next to the topic’s title).

In the meantime, I found a workaround by another user in the community that may help you in this thread:

Hello Figma Team and Community,

I hope this message finds everyone well. I’m a front-end developer, and my design team and I have been extensively using Figma for our design projects. We’ve come to greatly appreciate the versatility and user-friendliness of Figma, which has significantly streamlined our workflow. However, we’ve encountered a particular challenge that I believe, if addressed, could greatly enhance Figma’s functionality for a wide range of users, especially those working with Asian languages.

In many of our projects, there’s a need to incorporate vertical text orientation—a common requirement for designs involving Asian scripts. As front-end developers, we’re accustomed to achieving this effect through the CSS writing-mode property. It allows for a more culturally authentic representation and alignment with traditional practices in typography.

I understand that implementing new features is a complex process, involving careful consideration and allocation of resources. However, I wanted to express our team’s keen interest in having a feature similar to the CSS writing-mode available in Figma. This would not only facilitate a smoother design-to-development workflow for projects requiring vertical text but also open up new creative possibilities for designers worldwide.

Additionally, I’ve explored the possibility of developing a Figma plugin to introduce this functionality. However, it seems the current TextNode API might not support the creation of vertical text as of yet. I believe that an enhancement in this area could unlock significant potential for custom plugin development, further expanding Figma’s versatility.

I sincerely hope that the Figma team considers this suggestion for future updates. Such a feature would undoubtedly make Figma even more powerful and inclusive for global design communities.

Thank you very much for your continuous efforts to improve Figma, and for considering this suggestion. We’re looking forward to potentially seeing this feature in one of the future updates.

Warm regards.

The linked workaround is really not a solution though, because vertical text should support typesetting mixtures of CJK characters and latin characters (e.g. support option to rotate latin characters), and there’ll be other nuances for punctuations (centered comma and period, and different quotation marks).

CJK languages shouldn’t be treated as a 2nd-tier language. Please carefully consider this as this will strengthen the fundamentals of Figma as a design software.