What’s wild is that this isn’t limited to one browser — it happens across multiple Chromium‑based PDF editors because they all inherit the same underlying behavior. It’s 2026, and somehow the most widely used browser engine still can’t reliably commit a line of RTL text into a PDF.
This isn’t a niche corner case. Billions of people use non‑English scripts every day. Yet basic text handling in PDFs — one of the most common document formats on the planet — still breaks in ways that feel like the 1990s.
I know PDF internals are messy, but it’s still surprising that something this fundamental remains broken across so many tools. Anyone else run into this?
Antibabelic•4h ago
Unfortunately, it is generally up to the local developers to provide solutions, and they are often not up to the task. For example, Affinity Designer had poor RTL support for the longest time, due to certain assumptions built into their text rendering engine from the start. But making an equally featureful alternative with better support for these scripts would be a monumental task.
yerushalayim•3h ago
Once those assumptions are embedded in things like glyph ordering, bidi resolution, cursor movement, hit‑testing, line breaking, and font fallback, fixing RTL becomes a retrofit instead of a design principle. By the time a team realizes the gap, the shaping and layout stack is so tightly coupled that adding proper bidi handling feels like a massive rewrite.
You see this pattern everywhere: PDFium (used by all Chromium browsers), various UI frameworks, and even some OS‑level text components still mishandle RTL in 2026. The symptoms are always the same — disappearing text, reversed glyph order, broken cursor navigation, or failure to commit text at all.
This isn’t a niche corner case. Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and other RTL scripts represent hundreds of millions of daily users. The real issue is that global language support is still treated as optional rather than foundational, and the technical debt from those early assumptions keeps compounding.
Juliate•3h ago
I cannot imagine the nightmare it must be for non-western languages.
I don't know exactly what the real, hard incentive is to make it happen at last, as this needs a strong perspective over software as a tool to serve people, as well as some kind of artistic literacy: we need more people to care about the tools they build, and more people to pay the makers because of that. Steve Jobs, with all his downsides, had this kind of focus and impact. But this needs to be systemic, not exceptional.
breezykoi•3h ago
yerushalayim•3h ago
Same goes for Steve Jobs. One of his most underrated contributions was his insistence that typography, calligraphy, and the aesthetics of written language were not decorative extras but core to the human interface. Apple invested early in system‑wide text rendering that treated all scripts as first‑class citizens. It wasn’t perfect, but it showed what happens when leadership actually cares about the universality of writing and makes it systemic.
fuzzfactor•1h ago
I think part of the problem is that things like this are often just barely working on the one set of test data that often just barely covers the fundamental requirement in its most simplified "happy path" form to begin with. LTR in this case.
And then the coders move on to get the next objective barely working, but nobody ever goes back far enough to reinforce the weak points in the fundamental structure before it's a far more challenging task. And then if done it's still too challenging to go all the way back.