How do you set the text direction for a TextTable Cell in OpenOffice?

Question

I want to set the text direction for some cells in a TextTable so that they are vertical (i.e., the text is landscape instead of portrait). You can do this in Writer by selecting the cell(s), and going to: Table - Text Properties - Text Flow - Text Direction

However, I cannot figure out how to do this through the API. I tried using CharRotation, but it does not behave the right way. CharRotation simply takes the text, and rotates it (without adjusting any formatting). The text I am dealing with is formatted by tab stops, and does not behave correctly when rotated this way.

Answer 1

I finally figured this out after all these months!

You have to set the "WritingMode" property for the cell. In C#:

XCell cell = table.getCellByName(cellName);
((XPropertySet)cell).setPropertyValue("WritingMode", new Any((short) 
WritingMode.TB_RL));

I haven't tried it in python yet, but I suppose it would be something like this:

cell = table.getCellByName(cellName)
cell.WritingMode = 2

If you're using a statically typed language, make sure you cast it to a short. Doing typeof(WritingMode) won't work, for some odd reason.

See this issue in the OOo bug tracker.