Writing Upside Down

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I want to write a paragraph upside down in Scrivener. Is that possible?

I am writing a manual that contains exercises and I wanted to write the answers upside down under each exercise (instead of making the reader go to the end of the book, which is annoying, and writing the answers right side up makes them too easy to see).

Is this a current functionality of Scrivener?

2

If it’s not, you could probably find a font which would accomplish the same thing;

UpsideDown: fontzone.net/font-details/upsidedown
Or maybe Sdrawcab: fontzone.net/font-details/sdrawkcab

3

Interesting suggestion, but the backwards one would be too hard to read and the upside down one would have to be typed in reverse o_0

4

Enter the text normally.
Take a screen shot.
Invert the screen shot.
Import back into Scr.

ps

5

If I need to come up with an alternative solution, I’ve got a few ideas.

I’d just like confirmation that this is or isn’t possible in Scrivener.

Thanks.

6

You can go to Format > Text > Writing Direction, set right-to-left, and use one of the above suggested type fonts. Or you can use my earlier suggestion. Beyond that, I suspect you are asking for a capability not much in demand, and therefore unlikely to arrive any time soon.

Not ever Scrivener, powerful and versatile as it is, does every odd-ball thing its users ask for.

Go ahead and do some of the work yourself.

ps

7

Since you want to avoid “going to the back of the book” can we assume that your output is a printed book?

Because if so, it seems that PDF is the best output for this, and thus the answer section could be a separate PDF file that gets printed upside-down, something that is, I believe, quite simple for any printshop or printer with PDF tools.

As for whether upside down and backwards text is or is not possible, I suspect that the answer relies on the native text handling abilities of the OS, whether MS-Windows or Mac OSX.

  • asotir
8

It is indeed a book (sorry if the hint was too subtle). This is also why the reverse screenshot option is unworkable – the quality would be too low for printing.

I am self-publishing, so I am doing the work on my own.

I could use Photoshop to generate high quality jpg’s that I would reverse and insert in the file, but there could be a 100 inserts and that’s time consuming. I might also forget that idea entirely and just use footnotes…

Thanks.

9

You can handily give your solutions in upside down text with a combination of these two resources:

  1. A key command that does a character-by-character reversal on the currently selected text.

  2. An upside-down font (as one suggested earlier).

The former can easily be accomplished by making a very simple Automator service, and then using System Prefs > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts to assign that Service a key command.

Attached is a screen grab of the Automator settings for a ‘Reverse Selection’ service.

–gr
Reverse Selection (Automator).jpg