Why Arabic text appears reversed in PDF extraction and how developers can fix it

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Extracting Arabic text from PDFs often produces word-reversed output because PDF files store glyphs in visual paint order rather than logical reading order, and naive extractors assume these are the same. Developer Ayman Al-Absi identified four distinct failure modes while building Confileo, a PDF toolkit with Arabic language support. The core fix involves reconstructing logical text order using glyph coordinates and the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX #9), rather than relying on content-stream order or manually reversing strings. Additional issues include broken letter shaping when non-shaping renderers are used, missing Arabic fonts on servers, and inaccurate OCR on scanned documents due to models trained predominantly on Latin scripts. Numeric strings embedded in right-to-left sentences present a further edge case, where incorrect bidi handling can silently swap dates or figures and alter meaning.

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