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A
Ain5FCD
Participant
September 2, 2025
Question

Arabic text doesn't tag correctly in inDesign's PDF export

  • September 2, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 162 views

The tagging of Arabic glyphs is incorrect in my pdf. (Please note that English is not my first language, I apologize for any mistakes!)

 

What I've done so far:

I installed the ME version of the application, made sure all of the paragraph styles are in Arabic + RTL and used the world ready composer. I'm using a font that is intended for Arabic script (Nassim Arabic). During pdf export I made sure that the document language is set to Arabic.

 

When I view my document in Acrobat I can see that the language and binding are set correctly in the document properties. But if I view the tags for the paragraphs, the glyphs in these tags are all wrong. The tagged glyphs seem to be actual glyphs from an RTL writing system, just not the ones intended. When I copy-paste text from the pdf it does paste correctly, so the problem is only in the tags.

 

What could this be?

1 reply

Anubhav M
Community Manager
Anubhav MCommunity Manager
Community Manager
September 2, 2025

Hello @Ain5FCD,

Could you share more details, like the version of InDesign installed and links to sample INDD/PDF files, along with screenshots of the export settings used and the problem, after uploading them to a file-sharing service, so we can try to replicate this on our end?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

A
Ain5FCDAuthor
Participant
September 2, 2025

Hello Anubhav and thank you for the response!

 

I'm using InDesign 20.5. I'll add a screenshot of how the issue looks like on Acrobat. The same thing happens with all of my Arabic pdf files, no matter what font I use etc.

 

 

 

The screenshot above shows how the written content inside the tag is not the same as what is written in the layout. I am not fluent in Arabic and that obviously is a major challenge, but visually the tag seems to hold wrong glyphs.

 

I'll add screenshots of my export settings here:

 

 

Abhishek Rao
Community Manager
Abhishek RaoCommunity Manager
Community Manager
September 3, 2025

Hi @Ain5FCD,

 

Thanks a lot for sharing the screenshots and additional details. Could you confirm if this behavior is happening only with a particular file or if you've tested with multiple files and see the same result each time? It would really help if you could share a sample affected InDesign file along with a short screen recording showing your complete workflow from setting up the text to exporting the PDF. That way, I can test it directly on my end and check further with the team.

 

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

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