Get familiar91231
We recommend getting familiar with Bootstrap first by reading through our
Getting Started Introduction page
. Once you’ve run through it, continue reading here for how to enable RTL.
You may also want to read up on
the RTLCSS project
, as it powers our approach to RTL.
Bootstrap’s RTL feature is still experimental
and will evolve based on user feedback. Spotted something or have an improvement to suggest?
Open an issue
, we’d love to get your insights.
Required HTML
There are two strict requirements for enabling RTL in Bootstrap-powered pages.
-
Set
dir="rtl"
on the
<html>
element.
-
Add an appropriate
lang
attribute, like
lang="ar"
, on the
<html>
element.
From there, you’ll need to include an RTL version of our CSS. For example, here’s the stylesheet for our compiled and minified CSS with RTL enabled:
Starter template
You can see the above requirements reflected in this modified RTL starter template.
RTL examples
Get started with one of our several
RTL examples
.
Approach
Our approach to building RTL support into Bootstrap comes with two important decisions that impact how we write and use our CSS:
-
First, we decided to build it with the
RTLCSS
project.
This gives us some powerful features for managing changes and overrides when moving from LTR to RTL. It also allows us to build two versions of Bootstrap from one codebase.
-
Second, we’ve renamed a handful of directional classes to adopt a logical properties approach.
Most of you have already interacted with logical properties thanks to our flex utilities—they replace direction properties like
left
and
right
in favor
start
and
end
. That makes the class names and values appropriate for LTR and RTL without any overhead.
Working with RTL, through our source Sass or compiled CSS, shouldn’t be much different from our default LTR though.
Alternative font stack
In the case you’re using a custom font, be aware that not all fonts support the non-Latin alphabet. To switch from Pan-European to Arabic family, you may need to use
/*rtl:insert: {value}*/
in your font stack to modify the names of font families.