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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

Just throwing in my left handed anecdote here: the bottom of my hand was always covered in pencil graphite when I was in school because your hand drags over what you've been writing from left -> right. Also ring binders were a pain in the ass (your hand is blocked at the left margin lol)

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As a child I solved this problem by rotating my paper 90° to the right and writing “down”. Still do it til this day.

Although it gets awkward when someone wants to hold the paper for me while I sign. I have to gently tug it away from them so I can turn it.

I turn my paper about 45 degrees.

I have the same problem when people want to hold the paper for me to sign.

You can write "down" with your left because immediately above your hand on the page there's no hand to "drag behind." I had to think about your sentence for a while. (It might just mean I'm not very bright.)

I struggled with this through highschool. Pencil and gel pens were the worst. I never learned to write with my paper tilted like some lefties. I write just like a mirror image of a right hander, which lead to a lot of smudging and having to rewrite papers etc

This change my sophomore year in English class when my teacher told me a trick! Place a sticky note on the side of your hand that rests on the paper. No more smudging!

This was one of the reasons kids werent allowed to be left handed in the old days - you used fountain pens so it would smudge the ink

These days they make left-handed fountain pen ink. It dries much quicker to avoid smudging.

I'm right handed; when I experimented with writing with my left hand, I discovered that it's much easier to write "in mirror", right to left, using mirrored cursive characters. (also slanted in mirror)

Solves the problem with the hand overlapping the fresh writing and produces some funky-looking text.

I'm also left handed and this was never an issue for me. You hold the pencil out from your fingers thus your hand is sitting slightly below the line that is being written, traveling over unused paper constantly.

Only people that do that weird claw thing have that problem.

The trade off is that you have less visibility of the letters you just wrote, which can be annoying sometimes and lead to spelling mistakes.

Yes, that's why we did the "weird claw thing" aforementioned.

Anyway, no more handwriting these days...

What's the claw thing?

Some lefties look as if they are wrapping half their bodies around the pen/cil when writing.

I also do not write like this, smudging fresh ink as I write has never been an issue for me.

I did the weird claw thing, worked for me

That's the reason I write my signature from right to left, starting from the last letter.

It's weirdly left slanted but actually better than my normal handwriting.

If I had to do it again, I would have learned to write with my right hand due to occlusion. It gets worse if you try to learn how to write in Chinese (at least in modern orientations). I think the reason I became a programmer is just because keyboards were so liberating for me.

For Asian scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, a mechanical pencil works wonders, especially for ideograms. Get one of those auto-rotating ones like the Kurutoga and there is nothing hard specifically for left-handed folk.

Or indeed, use vertical writing, which is particularly well-suited for left-handed use.

Same here. Totally agree with this!

You should learn Arabic, then you can write in the other direction and watch the right-handed normies struggle with this :)

Just imagine what it's like to spend three years doing technical drawing in high school using Rotring pens [1], not to mention practicing calligraphy based on IRAM/ISO standards [2][3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotring

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instituto_Argentino_de_Normali...

[3] https://youtu.be/znrD1DjYqrE?si=Z7RsTatVCw3OKTdT&t=169

I've often wonder why this isn't a big problem for right-to-left languages.

It's only a problem if you rest your hand on the paper while writing rather than holding your hand above the paper and writing with your whole arm which i suspect used to be the norm in most places.

Also in languages written vertically and then right to left it would be less of an issue because the ink would have more time to dry before you get to the left of a given character.

Always have blue ink on the side of my hand where I have dragged my hand across the page and through my writing. Fountain pens were particularly messy.

Yes. And that crappy erasable ink that flourished in the 80s. It was a mess.

Fountain pens are fun too in the places that did those

> Also ring binders were a pain in the ass.

My suggestion would be to just turn them around so the spiral is on the right side

Yup. I tried that and got scolded by teachers because the lines are all off (big margin at the bottom. Thin red line on the wrong side. ) I tried to get the pads with the spiral at the top- that works.

You should learn Arabic: problem solved.

I used to have the same problem. Switching from pencils and pens to keyboards fixed it for me. :)

You should solve this problem by simply writing every page backwards from end to beginning.

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