Mirror text generator

Type on the left and the mirrored line appears on the right. Order decides whether the characters are reversed as well as flipped, and you usually want them reversed. Flipping the letters alone gives you backwards shapes still reading left to right, which isn't what a mirror does.

Each line is handled separately, so a block of text keeps its lines in order while every line runs the other way. Mirroring twice brings the original back, so there's no separate decode.

Unicode has no mirrored Latin alphabet. There's no reversed R waiting to be used, so the flipped shapes are taken from wherever a matching glyph already exists.

Я is the Cyrillic letter ya. И is Cyrillic i. Ɔ is an open O from the International Phonetic Alphabet, and ⅃ is a turned sans-serif capital L from the number forms block. They look right and they mean something else entirely, which is the trade this kind of text always makes.

Ten lowercase letters are symmetrical and map to themselves: i, l, m, n, o, u, v, w, x and z. Every other letter borrows a shape, and some of those borrowings are approximate rather than true mirrors. Unicode has no reversed h, so h takes the small capital ʜ, which is symmetrical and only reads as a mirror because of the letters around it. Anything outside the table is left as it was and listed under the output.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his 13,000 surviving notebook pages in mirror writing, right to left with every letter reversed. Held to a glass they read normally.

The romantic explanation is secrecy, and it doesn't hold up. His notes describe no method of concealment, the content is mostly observation and engineering rather than anything dangerous, and a mirror was not a rare object in Renaissance Florence. Anyone curious could read them in a second.

The duller explanation is likelier. Leonardo was left-handed, and dragging a quill right to left avoids smearing wet iron gall ink across the page with the side of your hand. He wrote conventionally when the page was meant for someone else.

Upside-down text rotates by 180 degrees instead of flipping horizontally, and uses the same borrowing trick with a different set of donor alphabets. Zalgo leaves the letters alone and decorates them.

To see which alphabet a mirrored character actually came from, paste it into the Unicode converter.