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A
ahmad mukhtar30273578booe
Participating Frequently
August 6, 2025
Question

Diacritics in the Arabic language

  • August 6, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 531 views

Problem:
I'm working on an Arabic educational book using Adobe InDesign. The Arabic text includes full diacritics (tashkeel), and everything looks perfectly aligned inside text frames that are placed within decorative shapes.
However, once I export the file to PDF, the diacritics become misaligned — especially when the text is inside shapes or grouped with other design elements.

I've already tried the following:

Enabled Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer

Used supported Arabic fonts (like Adobe Arabic and Amiri)

Ensured Right-to-Left paragraph direction

Disabled Text Wrap

Tried "Fit Frame to Content" and reset text frame options (zero inset spacing)

Exported using "Embed All Fonts" and PDF/X-4 preset

Yet the issue persists: the diacritics shift or appear outside their intended positions when viewed in the exported PDF.

✅ Text appears correctly inside InDesign
❌ But gets distorted or misaligned in the final PDF

How can I preserve diacritic positioning exactly as shown in InDesign when exporting to PDF?
Any help would be appreciated!

2 replies

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 6, 2025

There are actually a few threads here  reporting this issue, and similar issues with right to left languages, broadly speaking. You might try turning on the Legacy Character Shaping Engine in the Preferences - or turning it off, if it is already on. Another workaround that might get you something that you can export would be to make sure that the last character in every paragraph, and every story, is not an Arabic character. If you don't already know how, I can give you a find/change query that will append a space at the end of every paragraph. If that PDF exports correctly, then you have experienced the same bug that is reported here.

 

 

A
ahmad mukhtar30273578booeAuthor
Participating Frequently
August 7, 2025

I designed a book and I want a complete and simple solution. I understood from you that a Latin character should be placed at the end of each text frame containing Arabic text, but this is a tedious task. This issue should be solved programmatically if it is a software bug.

Abhishek Rao
Community Manager
Abhishek RaoCommunity Manager
Community Manager
August 7, 2025

Hi @ahmad mukhtar30273578booe,

 

Thanks again for detailing the issue you're seeing with diacritics shifting in your exported PDFs. Just wanted to check if what you're experiencing resembles another known case where diacritics were actually omitted when exporting Arabic or Persian text from InDesign. Here's the thread we noticed: Diacritics omitted in Arabic‑Persian text when exporting to PDF in InDesign 19.5

If this sounds similar, try the suggestions on that thread and see if it helps.  

 

Looking forward to hearing how it goes!

Abhishek

Anubhav M
Community Manager
Anubhav MCommunity Manager
Community Manager
August 6, 2025

Hello @ahmad mukhtar30273578booe,

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with InDesign. Would you mind installing the Arabic/Hebrew version of InDesign(https://adobe.ly/4fnw22s) to see if it helps?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

A
ahmad mukhtar30273578booeAuthor
Participating Frequently
August 6, 2025

The version I have installed is English Arabic

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