Phew; glad you didn't ask me O. lolololol

Yep. Great answer.

2.8.10 is my version.. obviously it didnt work. lol

I think she's talking about the reset button not working. She is no longer typing backward text.

I didn't read the entire thread, but I did find this to be a reason for backwards text. Adjusting the letter spacing to a large enough negative value creates backwards text. I don't know what solutions anyone else has come up with.

I know this is an *old* thread, but I JUST had this problem and this was the top google result no matter how I phrased the issue.

It SAYS "solved", but my issue doesn't seem to be discussed here (unless I missed it).

In the interest of helping anyone else who comes here looking for "why is Gimp writing all my text backwards" or somesuch, I thought I'd add my findings.

This is on Gimp 2.10.20, Windows 10.

My 9yo daughter was working on a project for Girl Scouts, and she calls me over saying the text won't write forwards.

So I start looking at all of the tool settings. All the tool settings are "correct" and "resetting" didn't work. It's set to write "left-to-right", but is clearly going right-to-left AND the letters are backwards. Does this on every layer of the image.

Everything I did and every menu item i looked at was treating the text as though it wasn't backwards, but it clearly was. I started getting really, really frustrated. I noticed that if i opened a new project, it didn't have this problem, but I didn't want to scrap hers, of course. This was something to do with this file, or the tool settings, or something. Couldn't figure it out.

I ended up saving, closing, and re-opening the project.

When it came back up, EVERYTHING was "backwards" to what it HAD been - EXCEPT for the text, which was now forwards.

It WASN'T the text that was backwards after all. The VIEW OF THE PROJECT was backwards.

I didn't know this existed (I'm no GIMP pro), but in the View menu, there is a "Flip & Rotate" submenu. Trying to flip the *image*, my daughter had apparently gone into the 'View' menu instead of 'Image' or 'Layer', found the "flip & rotate", thought "that's what I want", and did it.

I'm glad that re-opening the project cleared that view setting, or I'd probably still be looking for the solution.

Hope that's helpful to someone.

~PS

I never experienced this before, but you're quite right about this phenomenon. I didn't even know there was a flip option in VIEW. I guess it would come in handy while editing an image while looking through a mirror? Or maybe working with negatives?

must have felt so silly when you found it.
I wasn't laughing at your daughter by the way. (I just thought it was funny - the smallest of things can make me laugh)

By the way racer this may be a new feature in Gimp as a lot of sketchers were complaining that the canvas in gimp was not rotatable as in other programs.

Worked! The Reset to Default Values and the Explanation why the font would type backwards instead of forwards due to the -ve value in the letter spacing field. Thanks

The canvas is rotatable.... from many years.
Shift + Middle click (mouse's wheel) then drag... do it outside the image on the canvas
Shift + 1 (the exclamation mark ! above the Tab key) to reset the canvas