Arabic text reversed or disconnected in Photoshop and other apps

Two separate problems: joining and direction

Arabic needs two jobs done before it looks right. The first is shaping: most Arabic letters change form depending on where they sit, so a beh at the start of a word looks different from a beh in the middle or at the end. The second is bidirectional layout: the text is stored in the order it was typed, first letter first, and the app has to draw that line from right to left while keeping any English words and numbers left to right.

Unicode always stores Arabic in typing (logical) order and leaves joining and direction to the software that displays it. When an app or a particular text component lacks an Arabic layout engine, you get one or both failures:

• Disconnected letters: every letter appears in its standalone form because nothing applies the joining rules.
• Reversed words: each word starts from its last letter because everything is drawn left to right.

Look closely before you pick a fix. If the letters are joined but the sentence runs the wrong way, it is only a direction problem, and the paragraph direction setting in the app usually solves it. Unjoined letters mean the app is not shaping Arabic in that layer, that component or that font.

Fix it in the app first

The best fix is always native Arabic support, because the text stays editable, searchable and spell-checkable. These settings come from the vendors' own documentation; menu names can vary slightly between versions.

Photoshop

According to Adobe, Photoshop 23.0 (October 2021) and later handle Arabic through the Unified Text Engine with no extra configuration. If letters still come out unjoined in a current version, check three things: the font actually contains Arabic glyphs, your operating system has Arabic input enabled, and the layer was not created in an old file. Pick an Arabic font and retype or re-paste the text into a new layer.

In versions before 23.0 you had to switch the feature on. Go to Edit > Preferences > Type (Windows) or Photoshop > Preferences > Type (macOS) and select World-Ready Layout under Choose Text Engine Options. Then open a document, pick a Type tool and choose Type > Language Options > Middle Eastern Features. If that menu item stays greyed out, restart Photoshop.

Illustrator

Go to Edit > Preferences > Type (Windows) or Illustrator > Preferences > Type (macOS) and turn on Show Indic Options. Select your text, open the Paragraph panel menu and choose the Middle Eastern & South Asian Single-line Composer or Every-line Composer. Adobe notes that full right-to-left support ships in the Middle Eastern edition (English interface) and the North African French edition, so if the composer is missing, check which language version you installed.

After Effects and Premiere Pro

After Effects 22.1.1 introduced the Universal Text Engine, which lets you type, edit and animate Arabic directly. In Premiere Pro, left-to-right or right-to-left direction is set per graphic, and a default paragraph direction lives in the Graphics preferences. In recent versions many controls that used to sit in the Essential Graphics panel have moved to the Properties panel.

Unity

In Unity 6, UI Toolkit includes the Advanced Text Generator, which shapes Arabic and other right-to-left scripts. Enable it under Edit > Project Settings > UI Toolkit with Enable Advanced Text Generator, set each text element's generator to Advanced, and use a dynamic font asset that covers Arabic. TextMeshPro exposes a right-to-left switch, isRightToLeftText, but its documentation says nothing about joining Arabic letters, which is why many projects add a third-party shaping plugin or feed it pre-shaped text.

When pre-shaping is the right call

Pre-shape only when the software genuinely cannot join Arabic and you cannot update it or change its settings. Typical cases:

• An old version of a design app you are stuck with.
• A game project whose text component does not shape Arabic.
• LED signage, a kiosk or a playback system that draws characters exactly as received.
• Any pipeline that asks for text “as displayed” because it renders characters in stored order.

In those cases the Reversed Arabic tool does the two jobs the app should have done. It picks the joined form of every letter, including lam-alef ligatures and Persian letters such as پ چ گ ک ی, and then reorders each line so it reads correctly when drawn left to right. The joined forms come from Unicode's Arabic presentation-form blocks: legacy compatibility characters that Unicode says should not be used in data files. That is exactly why the output is for display only.

Reordering follows a simplified version of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm on each line, so Latin words and numbers keep their left-to-right order and brackets are mirrored to face the right way.

How to pre-shape Arabic, step by step

1. Open Reversed Arabic and set Goal to Prepare text for an app without Arabic support.
2. Paste your text exactly as you wrote it. Do not reverse it yourself first.
3. Leave Reverse the order for apps that write left to right switched on. Turn it off only if the app already gets the direction right but fails to join letters.
4. Check the result. The tool displays it the way an app without Arabic support will: left to right, with no reordering.
5. Copy it into the app and keep the original text somewhere safe.

مرحبا بكم في المعرض

ﺽﺮﻌﻤﻟﺍ ﻲﻓ ﻢﻜﺑ ﺎﺒﺣﺮﻣ

English words and numbers are not reversed internally. They move as a block to the correct place in the line, just as they would in software that supports Arabic:

معرض الكتاب Book Fair 2026

Book Fair 2026 ﺏﺎﺘﻜﻟﺍ ﺽﺮﻌﻣ

Multi-line text and text boxes

The tool processes each line separately, and that matters. An app without Arabic support wraps a long paragraph from the left. Paste one long pre-shaped line into a fixed-width text box and the app will push the beginning of the reversed string onto the first line, so the end of your sentence appears on top and its start at the bottom.

Break the lines yourself before shaping:

1. Decide how long each line should be in the layout.
2. Press Enter between the lines in your original text.
3. Shape the whole block once, then paste it.
4. In design apps, use point text (a single click with the Type tool) rather than a paragraph box that wraps automatically.

عرض خاص
لمدة 3 أيام فقط

ﺹﺎﺧ ﺽﺮﻋ
ﻂﻘﻓ ﻡﺎﻳﺃ 3 ﺓﺪﻤﻟ

If the wording changes later, edit the original and shape it again. Editing pre-shaped text letter by letter inside the app almost always breaks a joining form somewhere.

Common pitfalls

• Pasting the result into Word or a web page. Those apps support Arabic, so they reverse it a second time and it looks backwards. Use your original text there.
• Keeping the shaped text as your master copy. It does not work with search, spell-checking or screen readers. If you lose the original, run the result through Repair reversed text copied from a file in the same tool and proofread it.
• Boxes instead of letters. The app's font has no glyphs for Arabic presentation forms. Try a different Arabic font.
• Vowel marks in the wrong place. Without an Arabic engine, some apps stack diacritics on the wrong letter. Tick Remove diacritics if the marks are not essential to the meaning.
• Hidden direction marks. Text copied from websites and chat apps often carries invisible direction controls. The tool removes them automatically and tells you how many; you can inspect them first in the invisible character inspector.

مَرْحَبًا بِكُمْ

ﻢﻜﺑ ﺎﺒﺣﺮﻣ

RLMالسعر: 25 د.كRLM

For more on those invisible characters, read the invisible characters guide. If the reversed text came out of a PDF, start with fixing Arabic copied from a PDF.