Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written from left-to-right as well as from right-to-left.
Currently, WikiHiero supports only producing LTR hieroglyphs.
Having it able to produce RTL hieroglyphs would make them more suitable for inclusion in wikis in languages written from right to left, such as Arabic, Farsi, etc, where they will have the same reading direction as the main body text.
There exist a ticket for this in Phabricator.
I'm not sure that they should be the "same reading direction as the main body text", but it should be possible for them to have direction independent of the main body text, so that the same group of hieroglyphs looks the same whichever language you are describing them with.
It's not obligatory, of course. But it should be made possible in my opinion. It's more natural for the hieroglyphs to be in the reading direction of the text describing them.
There are two distinct cases here: specific instances of hieroglyphs being studied and described, i.e verbatim copies of inscriptions on walls or papyrus, statues, etc. In this case it should be possible to duplicate the original direction of the text for it to be verbatim and to match accompanying photographs, for instance. Which leads to: It would be great to be able to have vertical hieroglyphs too.
The other case is hieroglyphic compositions made up to be used as exemplary of the language or where their archaeological context is not relevant, in which case the directionality is arbitrary.
However, in the second case there is no reason the directionality must match that of text in another language -- language-Wikipedias are independent -- and in general why should the unified directionality be left-to-right? I mean other than this being the capability of the software currently.
I learnt that the extension will mirror asymmetric glyphs if suffixed by \ backslash:
<hiero>G11</hiero>
|
<hiero>G11\</hiero>
|
However, en:Help:WikiHiero syntax is lacking this information.
Fun fact: Mirroring works in Project:Sandbox of this wiki and on regular pages, but not in this discussion environment.
Source: German Wikipedia