v156 · textPath side · inspection

Side lab

side has two values, but it never acts alone: because right reverses the path, it changes what startOffset measures from, which way the glyphs face, and — on open paths — which end the text sets off from. This bench drives side, startOffset and text-anchor together and measures what actually got rendered.

Drive the attributes

Text laid on a selectable path; a red dot marks the path's start point THE·QUICK·BROWN·FOX·JUMPS

The markup

Measured off the rendering
measurementvalue

The open-path edge case. On an open arc or wave, side="right" reverses the path, so the text starts from the far end and runs back — and startOffset now measures from that far end too. Characters whose midpoint falls off the end of an open path are hidden entirely (the spec's out-of-range rule), which is why large offsets make the sentence visibly shrink here. The red dot marks the path's authored start point so you can see which end the text left from.

see also