Flutterby™! : sǝıןןoɟ ǝpoɔıun 2009-01-22 19:49:26.849108+00

sǝıןןoɟ ǝpoɔıun

2009-01-22 19:49:26.849108+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

˙ɯǝʇsʎs ʎqɹǝʇʇnןɟ ǝɥʇ uı ʎןʇɔǝɹɹoɔ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝƃɹɐן ƃuıןpuɐɥ ɯ,ı ɟı ǝǝs oʇ pooƃ osןɐ s,ʇı ˙ǝpoɔıun ɥʇıʍ sƃuıɥʇ ɹǝıןןıs uǝʌǝ op noʎ sʇǝן sɹǝʇʇǝן uʍop ǝpısdn

And, just so that this entry is at some point searchable, Upside Down Letters gives you Unicode characters that looks like the characters you typed, only upside down.

Oh. Good. It all gets entity encoded so there's no way I'll ever edit that string...

Some things fall into the "why would you do it, even if you could" class. This gets close. Even I, who spent a lot of time learning to read upside down, have a problem with the weird weights on these characters. but even when the face gets perfected, the question remains, "Why?" I can always turn my monitor over, if I want to see text upside down.

I think this would be very useful in a situation where the monitor was flat mounted inside a table top where people would be sitting around it.

The entry title comes out of RSS as "sǝıןןoɟ ǝpoɔıun" in my Google Reader. But that's likely not your problem.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-22 21:04:58.082522+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Eric, did you perhaps mean "sǝıןןoɟ ǝpoɔıun"? The Flutterby system lets you enter numeric (and, I believe, most of the standard labeled) entities directly. To escape an ampersand, you have to do &.

Yep. There are some things truly screwed up in Unicode. Actually, I think it's more in the way systems still handle ASCII by default. Everything should probably work on multi-byte characters with 8-bit ASCII being the special case. But that'd break a bunch of stuff - like it was 1999...

I help tutor now and then at the youth center and it's easier to read what kids are writing upside down than to flip books and textbooks constantly. doesn't take long to learn at all, but since the characters used here are very similar, although not exact, it still takes a few seconds of looking at some words before they become clear.