Reversed Hebrew in AutoCAD

How to tell them apart

If you see English letters or symbols instead of Hebrew, this is not reversed Hebrew. See the guides on Hebrew as English letters or symbols and question marks.

Letters in reverse order

AutoCAD draws .shx text left to right, like English, without turning Hebrew around. Whoever wrote in such a font typed each word from the last letter to the first so that it read correctly on screen. With an ordinary font like Arial, AutoCAD shows each Hebrew word right to left, and the word that was stored backwards now reads backwards.

This is the case everyone talks about, and in practice it is rare: in the client drawings we tested we found 112 such labels, against thousands stored as English letters or symbols. To fix it, the word has to be rewritten in the right order. By hand, that means retyping every label.

There is one trap. A short label such as ש.ב. reads correctly both ways, so a single label cannot tell you whether it is reversed. Gibberish decides the direction once for the whole drawing, from the labels where the answer is clear, since every label in a drawing was written the same way.

Mirror-image letters

The old Hebrew .shx fonts were built with their letters mirrored. To make them read correctly, each label got the Backwards flag, and sometimes the text style too, and the flag mirrors them again. The two flips cancel out, and as long as the old font is in place everything looks right.

Swap the font for Arial and the letters are ordinary, but the flag is still there and now it flips them. In the drawings we tested, 3,939 labels carried this flag.

For single-line text (TEXT) the manual fix is simple: select the labels, open Properties with Ctrl+1 and set Backward to No. It is worth clearing Backwards in the text style itself too (STYLE), so new labels don't come out flipped.

In some drawings the text was placed in a mirrored plane, and the flag cancelled that as well. There, changing the flag alone will not do, because the label still sits in the mirrored plane.

Reversed numbers

When Hebrew was stored in drawing order, the numbers inside it were stored that way too. With an ordinary font they read backwards: 23 instead of 32, 05:1 instead of a 1:50 scale. In a drawing this is the most dangerous case of all, because a reversed number looks like a valid number. A level of 23.10 that reads as 01.32 raises no suspicion.

Colons, numbering and brackets that jumped to the other end

Even Hebrew stored correctly, in an ordinary font like Arial, breaks at the edges. In DWG TrueView 2027, which draws the way AutoCAD does, every single-line label is laid out left to right, even when it is Hebrew. The words come out fine, but a mark at the edge of the label moves to the other end:

• The colon of a label like "notes:" shows up on the right, before the Hebrew word.
• A numbered label such as "1. bedroom" shows its numbering at the end.
• Brackets that open a label move to its end.
• A minus before a number, as in floor minus 1, moves to the other side of the number.

It happens precisely in the offices that already did the right thing and moved to an ordinary font. When there is one mark at an edge, you can fix it by hand: type it at the other end, for instance the colon before the word instead of after it. With more than one mark, the whole line has to be rearranged. We found no AutoCAD setting that changes this. Multiline text (MTEXT) follows a slightly different rule, and there too numbers, units and abbreviations at the edges come out in the wrong place.

Drawings that flipped after moving to AutoCAD 2025

Autodesk acknowledges the fault: with Windows region settings on Hebrew, AutoCAD 2025 shows Hebrew letters and numbers reversed. Their fix is AutoCAD 2026. The test is simple: if the same drawing looks right in another version or on another computer, the drawing is fine and the problem is the software.

What to do

The first four faults are inside the drawing, and Gibberish's repair handles them all at once. It rewrites Hebrew stored backwards, puts the numbers inside it back in order, clears the Backwards flag on labels and styles that move to an ordinary font, takes labels out of mirrored planes without moving them, and lays out every label so that colons, numbering, brackets and numbers at the edges sit where they belong, including labels that arrived correct. The plugin that runs it from inside AutoCAD is coming soon. Join the waiting list and we'll let you know when you can download it. You can already check a whole drawing for free and see some of its labels before and after the repair, or decode single labels.

Gibberish does not fix the AutoCAD 2025 bug, because it is not in the drawing.