I guess if you imagine a person walking from the beginning of the text to the end, their front (the side with the face on it) would face the end of the text.
But English never conceives of text in this manner; we view text as being arranged in a chronological order, where text that occurs chronologically earlier comes "before" text that occurs chronologically later. This mirrors the application of "before" and "after" to time in the rest of the language. Whether you conceive of reading as the reader traveling through text from the beginning to the end, or as text arriving at the reader, the reader will always encounter text on the left before text on the right, and therefore the text on the left is in front of the text on the right.
(In the only other language I'm qualified to talk about this for, mandarin chinese, earlier and later time might be indicated by either of two spatial metaphors: "up" for the past and "down" for the future ["up" is also used as a metaphor for beginning things]; or "front" for earlier and "back" for later. When text is read from left to right, "front" is used to indicate text on the left.)
Here ( http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm ) is someone writing about the ancient Egyptian writing system, inadvertently assuming that the front of text is its beginning and the back of text is its end:
> Note that Egyptian glyphs have a front and a back. All the images above and below face to the left, [...] which indicates that the text is to be read from left to right. This is conformable with the usage of English and other European languages. However, although this would be familiar and agreeable to the Egyptians, Egyptian usage was ordinarily to write from right to left, as today is done in Hebrew and Arabic. They indicated this direction by having all the glyphs face to the right instead of to the left
(Egyptian glyphs often depict a person or an animal with an actual face. They face towards the beginning of the text, not the end.)
You seem to speak English at a fully native level, based on your writeup here. (Although you don't seem to have picked up on the idea that if a quantifier "precedes" a '?', it must be "in front" of that '?'.) Do you have another native language? Are you based in a country that primarily speaks some other language? What is the metaphor that determines that later words are "in front" of earlier words?
