When opening plain text files, why are some paragraph-initial characters such as parenthesis, square bracket, wedge, chevron, etc, pointing the wrong way?
This will be most common when opening documents that contain right-to-left text. Certain Unicode characters such as those mentioned in the question have to be “mirrored” if they occur in right-to-left text. Applications can usually tell which characters need to be mirrored by their context, i.e, what characters are around them. However paragraph-initial (or, in some applications, line-initial) characters are also affected by the overall paragraph (or line) direction (which may be different that the first bit of text in the paragraph). Solutions for Word users: When opening a file, tell Word that document content is primarily right-to-left. In Tools / Options / General set Confirm conversion at open. Then when you open the plaintext file, select Open as right-to-left document. Or, if you have just the a few paragraph-initial characters that are wrong, you can use the macros in Right-to-left scripts in Microsoft Office to correct individual characters.
