These tests are obtained from the SVG 1.2 Tiny BiDi test suite: 1) http://www.w3.org/International/tests/svg/test-direction-unicode-bidi-0 I copied all tests manually, and renamed them according to this conention: -> Section "1. Direction on tspan in text elements" -> Test "1 Default context, inline dirRTL ubEmbed" --> tspan-dirRTL-ubEmbed-in-default-context.svg -> Test "2 Default context, inline dirRTL ubNone" --> tspan-dirRTL-ubNone-in-default-context.svg ... All references to SVGFonts have been removed (remove the section, rename font-family="SVGFreeSansASCII,sans-serif" to font-family="Arial"). Correct image references from "fooX.png" to "resources/fooX.png". These tests are made for SVG 1.2 Tiny, which has a different definition for the "direction" property compared to SVG 1.1 First/Second Edition. SVG 1.1 First/Second edition says: (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/text.html#RelationshipWithBiDirectionality) This property specifies the base writing direction of text and the direction of embeddings and overrides (see 'unicode-bidi') for the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. For the 'direction' property to have any effect, the 'unicode-bidi' property's value must be 'embed' or 'bidi-override'. SVG 1.2 Tiny says: (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGTiny12/text.html#DirectionProperty) This property specifies the base writing direction of text and the direction of embeddings and overrides (see 'unicode-bidi') for the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. For the 'direction' property to have any effect on an element that does not by itself establish a new text chunk (such as the 'tspan' element in SVG 1.2 Tiny), the 'unicode-bidi' property's value must be embed or bidi-override. The main difference is that foo bar defines the start of a new text chunk and thus the direction property is taken into account, whereas in SVG 1.1 the direction property would be ignored unless you explicitely set unicode-bidi to embed/bidi-override. This is now handled properly in WebKit, as it's easy to make both 1.1/1.2 mode work for us. 2) http://www.w3.org/International/tests/svg/test-direction-alignment-0