ykcowrebbaJ

Topics/tags: Miscellaneous, Web, CSC 151, typography

Warning: Some of the text in this musing is likely to be particularly difficult for those with dyslexia.

In the discussion of XML in CSC 151, I use a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s [1] Through the Loooking-Glass. It looks something like the following.

What manner of things? said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly) That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!

There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, —for it’s all in some language I don’t know, she said to herself.

It was like this.

                       YKCOWREBBAJ

       sevot yhtils eht dna,gillirb sawT’
     ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
            ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
          .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA

I took the text from Project Guttenberg’s HTML version of the book. But something in that text was bothering me. Is it bothering you, too?

Did you miss it?

While the letters in each line of Jabberwocky are written in reverse order, the letters are not flipped. What does it look like in a printed version? Fortunately, the Web contains a wealth of resources, and I was quickly able to find a PDF of a relatively early edition. Here’s what that section looks like.

That is, they mirrored the text in the book. That makes it worth considering for the reading in which I present the work.

When I was working in Scribble, I didn’t really have a way to achieve the mirror image. But now I’m working in Markdown and HTML and have a bit more control.

Stack Overflow provided me with instructions for mirroring text. So, with a little bit of effort, including figuring out styles in kramdown and a few subtleties, I was able to achieve the following output using <span style="transform: scale(-1,1); display:inline-block;">.

                JABBERWOCKY.

      ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
          All mimsy were the borogoves.
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

Not bad. That achieves the indended effect, including the backwards slope of the italic letters. For some reason, I find myself particularly appreciating the backwards ms (m). On the other hand, the code I used for indentation is a hack. But that’s an issue for another day.

Here’s a question for the digital humanists out there: How would you mark up the mirrored Jabberwocky in XML? Would you put it in readable order with a tag that indicates mirroring, or would you use the backwards words, as Project Gutenberg did? How about the lines of the poem?

Postscript: Why do so many people spell borogoves as borogroves? [2]

Postscript: For some reason, it seems appropriate to write a bit of Jabberwocky backwards and to mirror it. Let’s see …

          .YKCOWREBBAJ

  sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT’
    ;ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
  ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
    .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA

Yes, that’s the text in the correct order, but with each letter mirrored. Reading it makes my brain hurt. But it also makes me want to explore this approach more.

But typing text backwards is hard. I’m tempted to figure out ways to get the computer to reverse text for me. Let’s see. Oh, it’s easy.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

If anyone cares, here’s the code I used to generate that fascinating output.

 <span style="transform: scale(-1,1); display:inline-block; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override;">Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.</span>

I love the Web.

[1] Or is that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s?

[2] At least Google asks, Did you mean: borogoves [3].

[3] Why doesn’t Google end its questions with a question mark?

Version 1.0 of 2019-01-10.