Mirror text generator

Order decides whether the characters are reversed as well as flipped. Pick Reverse it too. Flip letters only 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. Four characters don't return. Lowercase f shares its mirror with F, so it comes back as F. The digits 2, 5 and 9 mirror into S, 2 and P, and a second pass mirrors those again.

Unicode has no mirrored Latin alphabet. There's no full-size reversed capital 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 a capital open O from African alphabets, and ⅃ is a reversed sans-serif capital L from the letterlike symbols block. They look right and mean something else entirely.

Nine lowercase letters are symmetrical and map to themselves, i, l, m, n, o, u, v, w and x. The tool leaves z as it is too, for want of a mirrored form. 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 notes in mirror writing, right to left with every letter reversed, and more than 7,000 pages of them survive. Held to a glass they read normally.

The romantic explanation is secrecy, and it's the weaker one. Writing masters of the time demonstrated mirror writing, and his letters to other people are in the ordinary script a notary would use. Anyone with a mirror could read the notebooks.

The duller explanation is likelier. Leonardo was left-handed, and writing right to left keeps the hand from smudging ink it has only just put down. 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.