I am needing to orient text in a table to be vertical instead of horizontal
for certain cases. We have a table in fo and when we put text in the
table-cell we would like to rotate the text 90 degress to be vertical if it
is too long to fit in the table horizontally. Is this possible to do in
XSL-FO.

See reference-orientation property: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#reference-orientation

This property does not apply to table-cells.

I am amazed. The property applies to all areas which generate
a reference area (see URL above). Table cells generate reference
areas:
  The fo:table-cell formatting object generates one or more
  normal reference-areas.