Systems and methods are described that allow a user to set the orientation of characters to be displayed on a display based on the orientation of the printer. If the printer is positioned in a right side up orientation, the characters are displayed in a right side up manner. If the printer is in another orientation, such as upside down, the systems "flip" the characters so that the user can read the display. Each character is typically stored in a bitmap comprising a matrix pixels aligned in rows and columns. The systems display the characters by incrementing through each column and displaying the pixels in the column. When the character is to be displayed in an upside down manner, the systems read the columns from the bit map out in reverse order. For each column, the systems flip each pixels to thereby flip the character displayed.