How to easily change the orientation of your writing

Since I found a way to create fonts for my fictional writing systems, I've been busy the past few weeks getting them done. Along the way, I've learned a few things. Most fictional alphabets are written left to right, because that's how it's done in the Western world. There are other ways of writing around the world, including right to left, and top to bottom, which usually is read from right to left. There is at least one writing system that switched between being read left to right and right to left--the direction switched every line. There are also rare occurrences of natural writing that proceeds from top to bottom and reading left to right, but so few that word processing programs are not set up to handle them with just a few clicks of the mouse. There is also no good way to make the word processors I work with write right to left without making a lot of changes to your computer, including an OS change to a language that requires one to write right to left, i.e. Hebrew. However, I found a way to force your word processor to write top to bottom with the lines moving from left to right, and I also figured out which programs to use and what to do to write right to left without changing your OS language to Hebrew or another language written right to left.

To write top to bottom and left to right, you first need a custom font because all your letters must be the same width. I was designing a vertical cursive font, so I automatically made all my letters the same width and kept track of the alignment of each because they needed to seamlessly run from one letter into the next. Next, you need Open Office Org's writer to create the document you will use. More recent versions of MS Word may work correctly now, but the version I'm required to use for work, while it says it can handle up to 45 columns on a page, will not allow me to create a page with that many columns on it! However, using OOO's writer you can create a document for Word that has that many columns on it, and Word can open and use it. I chose numerous narrow columns, because my goal was to make each column narrow enough that it forced the word processor to display a single character per line before moving down to the next line. Since columns are ordered left to right, this resulted in a document that writes from top to bottom and left to right. OOO will allow you to save your document in Word's format, so you can open and use it in Word.

My next challenge was to write from right to left without doing an OS language change. I found that simply activating Asian language support in OOO didn't work, for while it allowed me to specify writing right to left, it actually displayed the words from left to right and only moved everything from beginning each line at the left side of the page to the right.

However, I have experience with numerous other programs, including drawing programs that allow you to create what's called a text box. Since a text box is a drawing object, it can be manipulated to face any direction you want, and that coupled with another custom font provided my solution. First, you need to create a font with all the letters facing backwards. This is so your letters will face the correct direction so you can read them properly when the image is reversed. Once that's done, you can use either Windows Paint or OOO's drawing feature to write your message. In Paint, create a text box. Switch to your backwards facing font and write what you want to say in the correct order--if you want to say "correct", you will type "correct" and not "tcerroc". It will display every letter backwards because it's writing from left to right. Once your text is done being written, BEFORE YOU EXIT YOUR TEXT BOX, go to your Home tab, and to the left of your tools you will see orientation controls. Choose Rotate, and Flip Horizontal. Your text box will reverse itself, and since you used your backwards facing font, all your letters will now be facing the right direction, all without doing a global language change on your computer. To do the same thing in OOO's drawing, you will create your text box, write what you want it to say using your backwards facing font, and exit the text box. Select the text box (if it's the only thing on the page, press CTRL and A to select all), then find Modify on the top menu. Go to Convert, and convert your text box to a bitmap. Go to Modify on the top menu again, and choose Flip, Flip Horizontal, and your text box will reverse. In either program, if you are writing in several different fonts and orientations, you will create a separate text box for each.