Talk:1137: RTL

There's a typo in the comic - hte should be eht for "the" spelled backwards -jars99

Unless you consider "th" a single character, which by the way makes a lot of sense as it is derived from old-english "eth". -- 62.245.198.190 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Unless you further consider that "they" doesn't share that in the comic, making it internally inconsistent. 76.122.5.96 11:40, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

It should be noted that at some point, "the" was corrected. Rawmustard (talk) 16:42, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Acutally, unicode 202e doesn't "flip proceeding text back-to-front", it overrides the direction, setting it to "right-to-left" for the following text. It's back-to-front for most of us like "left-to-right" is to other writing systems. I know it's nitpicking, but xkcd readers should appreciate the symmetry. BKA (talk) 07:23, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't see the reversed title. My window manager is not UTF-8 compatible, so when a window title is set to string containing UTF-8 characters, it doesn't change. This brings the question if it really is a browser problem or if the browsers behave as expected and the window manager is at fault. -- 89.177.52.2 09:17, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

It's not a problem per sec. Browsers that get the reversed title are processing the UTF symbol correctly, there's no bug there. And the window manager has no bearing on the title text except for maybe font. Davidy²²(talk) 09:32, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Well its the window manager that renders the window title, but it is composed by the Browser. I think that the browser should insert an appropriate number of U+202c characters, in this case it should be "xkcd: [U+202e]LTR[U+202c] - Mozilla Firefox". That would render as xkcd: RTL - Mozilla Firefox". By the way, the tab caption in Firefox is "xkcd: LTR". In Chromium and Opera it is shown correctly as "xkcd: RTL". Joha.ma (talk) 09:47, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Another way to see this in effect is to try to type in this test page: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/202e/browsertest.htm - and this also works in etherpad, as suggested in the caption.--Anarcat (talk) 00:09, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Black Hat seems to have used U+202b, not e. The individual characters are left-to-right. Check the D, E, L, N, S, and ? 24.193.153.138 02:46, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

No, U+202e does not actually mirror the characters themselves, just the displayed order. U+202b only changes the order for characters that don't have embedded direction, such as the period, which can be used with multiple languages. Bugefun (talk) 05:00, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Actually, it does mirror some characters, namely those that have the mirrored property. For example, the parentheses or mathematical relations like the less-than sign. Here is a list of them. --Ulm (talk) 12:34, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

‮The text is not always mirrored - some browsers and font-sets do not 'understand' U+202E, so the text here might be displayed with a box before it. 173.49.135.77 15:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

The title of this comic has an embedded RTL in the title, as has been noted somewhere. Because of this, Randall's Archive page is now screwed up, with all titles before this comic (listed after this comic on the Archive page in descending order) now being reversed. Ha, ha! He hacked himself! 70.111.5.179 01:59, 14 January 2013 (UTC)larK

just randomly came across this comic today, and not only is the title LTR, but also preceeded by some gibberish characters: "‮LTR" using firefox, don't know how - i don't think it has always been like that on my machine... 162.158.89.187