Text Reverser Utility

The Text Reverser is a simple little utility for revesing text. You type in one text area, e.g. "The quick brown fox..." and in the other you will see "...xof nworb kciuq ehT". The reversed text is automatically placed on the clipboard, so you can simply go to another window and paste at any time.

Why would you want to do this? You probably don't, unless you are struggling with rare scholarly texts in ancient languages that go right to left, and use specialized alphabets. Windows doesn't have an Pahlavi locale setting, last I checked. I originally wrote it to help out the Ancient Iranian Font Project, now housed at St. Catherine University, but if you find it useful in some other context, great!

Recommended Download

To use the TextReverser, the best thing for most people is to download

TextReverser.jar (6KB)

Save it to your desktop (or wherever you like) and double click on it to run it.

The only thing that can go wrong is you may not have Sun's Java software installed on your computer, in which case double-clicking will probably do nothing, or give you an inscrutable error. Fortunately, this is easy to fix. Go to the main

Java Download

site, and click the giant "Free Java Download" button.

Old Installers

At one point, I made a proper installers for the Text Reverser, which installs Java, creates a folder and shortcuts and so on. However, those installers are now very old, and haven't been updated for recent versions of operating systems. They still seem to work for most people, so if having a folder in the Programs menu and so on is important to you, you can still try them and hope for the best.

Platform		Instructions
Windows	Download (3.8M)	After downloading, double-click `install.exe`
Mac OS	Download (7.1M)	After downloading, double-click `install.exe`
Unix	Download (709k)	After downloading open a shell and, `cd` to the directory where you downloaded the installer. At the prompt, type `sh ./Install.bin`.