Participant

Answered

Arabic PDF characters are disjointed and reversed!

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
October 9, 2012
10 replies
208423 views

Hello guys,

I have a serious and urgent issue and I hope this expert community could help me out in finding a solution for it.

I have a magento CMS ecommerce based group buying deals website based in UAE and my developers have coded it in a way to send out PDF coupon vouchers in Arabic language to customers who bought the deal.

The problem is that the characters inside the PDF look very akward! They are disjointed and not connected together and they are displayed in a reversed order which can only be readable from left to right. So in other words the coupon vouchers in Arabic look extremely messy!

I have no idea what I need to do in order for me to fix this, do I need to work on the unicode? Is there a specific Arabic font I can use to resolve this?

Any help would be extremely appreciated guys!

Thank you

Ziad

Correct answer Zaid Al Hilali

From what I see, it is not related to PDF or Acrobat, your CMS system may not support Arabic fully or it's not PDFing in the right way. The developers need to look into this matter, but I apologies for not having any suggestions for them.

Jamal NUMAN

Known Participant

I got the same issue using the Acrobat Pro 2025

What could be the solution for this?

R

ricky_6770

Participant

following issue while exporting pdf, urdu/arabic text disturbed

M

Mohammad AlShaabi

Participant

I'm using Adobce Acrobat professional directly without using any system and I have the same issue, I just open any PDF document on my desktop then I add text and I type arabic words and the letters are disconnected. I have this issue since years, all IT technicains any where in Arab world knows that Adobe Acrobat PDF can't handle arabic text well.

T

Tariq Ahmad

Community Manager

Hi @Mohammad AlShaabi,

Sorry for the delayed response and troubled experience.
If you haven't found an answer already, you can try checking the app's language preference.

Launch Acrobat
Go to Preferences > Language. Keyboard shortcut (Cmd + K) Mac and (Ctrl+K) Wins.
Try tweak preferences and click ok
Close Acrobat and launch Acrobat again.
Check the issue.

Let us know how it works at your end.

~Tariq

RHAddict

Participant

10 years later and this issue is STILL not fixed! Says a lot about a big company that has enough resources to fix any issues.

N

Nadia26150649l8wr

Participant

Dear all: I have found a solution. Import the excel data into a software like STATA (import all data as string). Suppose your variable name is X. Use the command:

replace X=ustrreverse(X)

T

tayeb27951578g467

Participant

A temporary solution could also be this python code written by ChatGPT
def reverse_words(input_string):
words = input_string.split()
reversed_words = [word[::-1] for word in words]
return ' '.join(reversed_words)

So you copy text from the pdf and put it in the python code and it does the job for you.
An example would be:
a="نيمدقتملاب"
print(reverse_words(a))# Output: بالمتقدمين

But the copying is still showing some other unexpected errors.

A

A J5FC7

Participant

In hat case, use adobe editor to write, not reader and typewriting tool...

Z

Ziaur Rahiman5F90

Participant

There seems to be no solution as yet. Is there any fix by adobe for this please?

D

Dr. Wail

Participant

I have the same problem when converting a PDF file containing arabic words to Excel using EXPORT PDF from within Adobe Acrobat Reader DC , after buying the annual subscription. The resulted excel file contained the arabic words in a messy form. The arabic letters were disjointed and inverted (from left to right).

I could find a solution.

I converted the file into Word (.docx) file by EXPORT PDF also, and the resulted file was in a very acceptable way, that means the arabic words were in the right direction and the letters were jointed.

Then I made copy & paste to a new Excel sheet and the result was very fine with arabic words in the right way.

I hope it helps somebody.

A

Anonymous

@THinkFirst ... We're proud of our language ... the richest in the world .. living for more than 2000 years ..
We Arabs inveted the decimal system ... that is the basis of building the civilized world ... while & your people were living in caves ... and spending your time hunting & fighting ...

and we Arabs have many engineers working all over the world .. and we have enough money to buy from cheap people like you

Go and read about the Arab culture, Arabic Numerals and read about early scintists & philosophers who flourshed in Arabian led era such as ِAvecenna , Alkhawarizmi

ی

یک ایرانی2416472352s9

Participant

Not true. Kawarismi was Persian, not Arab. He was from a region names Kharazm (central asia today) which used to be very much a Persian territory separated from Persia after the invasion of Monguls.

alex_dette

Participant

I believe this is a compiling issue with the program and PDF, I have the same challenge before. On our system we can write Arabic letters with no problem at all, but when we export report to PDF , pdf reverses the letter and separated the arabic letter.

For exporting documents I did try using Crystal report viewer and it works perfectly fine, I think adobe needs to configure something on their end.

I went online to update my Acrobat pdf DC , install multi language, change the language preferences and tick right to left etc. all this did not work at all...

See below sample:

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

Dear Alex,

Can you explain in details how do you create the PDF from your "system", are you choosing to print to PDF, save as PDF, or using PDFMaker to generate the PDF? Not all PDFs are created equal.

See, I know Acrobat has issues with Arabic in some aspects, however whether we are on Mac or PC, we're generating PDF with Arabic content for decades now using Microsoft Office (Mac lately), Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, AutoCAD, and from web pages. These PDFs with Arabic content has been the standard media in printing industry with no issues apart from common problems not related to Arabic language.

Original Poster is using a specific Content Management System where they generate PDFs from it. OP didn't come back to tell us how he is generating the PDF from their CMS, but you may tell us how you're doing it, and only this way we can judge if it is an Acrobat issue or not.

A

Anonymous

Even in Microsoft SharePoint .. when Searchable PDFs with Right-to-Left scripts ( such as Arabic) , are indexed .. SharePoint only recognizes reversed text .. and shows search preview with weirdly reversed text ...

this is surely rooted to the Filter that Microsoft bundles with SharePoint .. that filter is suffering from the same issues that are shown in Adobe Reader + Internet Explorer & MS Edge ... While Google's Chrome does not show such issues and handles right-to-left words properly

Zaid Al Hilali

Correct answer

Community Expert

From what I see, it is not related to PDF or Acrobat, your CMS system may not support Arabic fully or it's not PDFing in the right way. The developers need to look into this matter, but I apologies for not having any suggestions for them.

A

Anonymous

Adobe seam to be turning their heads away from this nasty BUG !!! and blaming others for this issue !!

Where the fact of the matter is that the issue of REVERSED text in text layer such as that produced from Google's Tesseracct-OCR

is to do with Adobe's Acrobat & Reader being unable to properly handle the text flow characters within the text or whatever reason .

Google's Chrome DOE NOT have the same issue .. and when copying or saving the text from a PDF , he text is correctly extracted.

Even Searching in Chrome PDF viewer is done properly ... While in Acdobe Reader and also MS Explorer & Edge the text is extracted in REVERSED order .. even highlighting text is a BIG MESS in these products .. while i Chrome things go very smoothly

Common ADOBE .. you have to akcnowledge that your software s buggy .. and you should put a solution for this nastry bug !!! and stop playing the blame game !!!

NabeelFA

Participant

‎Good day,

‎I’m a frequent user of the Adobe DC and I use it on all of my PDF, my problem that it’s not showing the Arabic fonts on editing to a PDF file or Singing it, like if I want to add the word “سلام” it will show it like “س ل ا م” separating each character. I tried the support for couple of years and was updating my versions as available, but still not working.

‎Waiting for your support & feedback.

‎Thanks,

‎Nabeel

S

shiblel8213745

Participant

I have the same issue.

gener7

Community Expert

I'll try, Ziad

You can try and contact whoever typed up the coupon. They have the original document and the program that created it, they should fix it and post a new PDF.

Acrobat can do minor edits, but it is not a proper Arabic language creator or editor.

First be sure that "enable right-to-left language options" is checked in your Acrobat preferences:

Maybe that will fix it.

If you can't get the people who designed your coupon to fix the problems, you can save the PDF as a Microsoft Word document and edit in an Arabic version of Word. Word should have proper Arabic fonts and right to left text flow. Then you convert to PDF from Word's Acrobat tab. It is not the best answer, but if you cannot go back to the place that designed your coupon, you may have to redo it in a proper editor and export it to PDF.

The command in Acrobat to convert your PDF to Word is: File > Save As > Microsoft Word > Word Document

This is not an easy question

Gene

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded