[haste]

Except that the above solution is a horrible hack which will break on multi-byte letters. That being said, the underlying library which blizzard uses for fonts in WoW does support vertical text. We don't have access to this however, as the WoW engine most likely doesn't implement it.

We could of course just do:

function vertical(str)
   -- Dealing with multi-byte?
   local _, len = str:gsub("[^\128-\193]", "")
 
   -- nah...
   if(len == #str) then
      return str:gsub(".", "%1\n")
   else
      return str:gsub("([%z\1-\127\194-\244][\128-\191]*)", "%1\n")
   end
end

edit: damn drycoding, fixed the syntax error.