Arabic PDF text bug traced to library version mismatch, not flawed code
A developer spent months debugging reversed Arabic text in PDF extraction, believing the issue required implementing the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm from scratch. The real cause turned out to be inconsistent behavior across versions of LibreOffice and PyMuPDF — older versions returned text in visual paint order, while newer ones returned correct logical order. A silent fallback mechanism further obscured the problem: a breaking API change in PyMuPDF 1.26.5 caused the secondary extraction engine to crash undetected, making it impossible to tell which engine was processing each file. The developer's custom bidi-reconstruction code was actually corrupting text that newer library versions had already ordered correctly. The final fix required just two lines of compatibility shim code rather than a complex algorithmic solution or version rollback.
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