Arabic Letters Not Connecting? How to Fix Broken Arabic Text in Photoshop, Illustrator, Canva & Word

You type or paste a perfectly good Arabic word — say سلام — and your design app shows م ا ل س: four separate letters, in the wrong order. It is the single most common Arabic design mistake, and anyone who reads the script spots it instantly. It turns up on restaurant signs, film posters and even tattoos.

The good news is that it is almost never a problem with your text. It's a problem with the software's text engine, and it usually takes one setting to fix. This guide explains what's going on, then walks through the fix app by app.

Why Arabic breaks: shaping and direction

Two things have to happen before Arabic can display correctly, and Latin text needs neither of them.

1. Shaping. Arabic is cursive, and most letters change shape depending on where they sit in a word. The letter bāʾ is stored as a single character (ب), but it should be drawn as بـ at the start of a word, ـبـ in the middle and ـب at the end. Your file stores only the basic letter. Choosing the right connected shape is the job of the app's shaping engine, and some letter pairs, like lām + alif (لا), must merge into a ligature. If the engine can't shape Arabic, you get the isolated form of every letter, side by side. Our guide to Arabic letter forms shows all four shapes of every letter.

2. Bidirectional ordering. Arabic is written right to left, but text is stored in logical order: the first letter you type comes first in memory. The app has to run the Unicode bidirectional algorithm to lay it out right to left, and to handle numbers and Latin words mixed into the line. If it doesn't, the letters come out in reverse.

So the two classic symptoms have two distinct causes:

The lām-alif test

Here's a ten-second test for any app. Type the two letters ل then ا. A correctly shaping app will merge them into the single ligature لا. If you see ل and ا sitting separately, shaping is off. Fix the engine setting before you do anything else.

Don't "fix" it by reversing the text

Some online tools "fix" broken Arabic by reversing the letters and swapping in hard-coded presentation forms, the pre-shaped glyphs stored in Unicode's Arabic Presentation Forms blocks. The result looks right in that one broken app, but it is no longer real Arabic text. It can't be searched, spell-checked or edited, screen readers can't read it, and it breaks again the moment the file opens anywhere with proper Arabic support. Use these converters only as a last resort for software that truly can't be fixed, and never for text that will live on a website.

Photoshop

Photoshop 2022 (version 23.0) and later ship with Adobe's Unified Text Engine, which shapes Arabic and handles right-to-left text by default. On a current version, a fresh text layer should just work.

If it doesn't, the culprit is usually an old text layer. Layers created by the legacy Latin engine, including layers inside older PSD templates you downloaded, keep that engine's behaviour. Pasting Arabic into them gives you separated letters.

1. Create a new text layer rather than editing the template's layer.
2. Choose a font with Arabic support (see the font section below).
3. In the Paragraph panel, set the direction to right-to-left if the controls are shown.

On older versions (Photoshop CC up to 2021):

1. Open Edit › Preferences › Type (on a Mac, Photoshop › Settings › Type).
2. Under Choose Text Engine Options, select Middle Eastern and South Asian.
3. Restart Photoshop. The setting doesn't apply until you do.
4. Make a new text layer and type or paste your Arabic there.
5. If you need the right-to-left paragraph buttons, enable Type › Language Options › Middle Eastern Features.

Illustrator

1. Open Edit › Preferences › Type (Mac: Illustrator › Settings › Type) and tick Show Indic Options.
2. Select your text frame.
3. In the Paragraph panel's flyout menu (☰), choose Middle Eastern & South Asian Every-line Composer, or the Single-line Composer.
4. Set the paragraph direction to right-to-left.

As in Photoshop, the composer applies per paragraph. If a pasted paragraph is still broken, select it and apply the composer again.

InDesign

In the Paragraph panel's flyout menu, choose Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer (or the Single-line version), then set the paragraph direction to right-to-left. For long Arabic documents, build this into a paragraph style so every new paragraph inherits it.

After Effects

Open Edit › Preferences › Type (Mac: After Effects › Settings › Type) and set Text Engine to South Asian and Middle Eastern. Text layers created after the change will shape Arabic correctly. Recreate any layer that was made before.

If you only need a short animated line, such as a title card, a logo sting or a social clip, you can skip the text engine entirely. Animate the calligraphy in the Arabify video studio, export a transparent WebM, and drop it into your timeline as footage.

Canva

Canva's editor shapes Arabic correctly. When Arabic looks wrong in Canva, the cause is almost always the font: Latin-only fonts have no Arabic glyphs, so Canva either shows nothing useful or swaps in a fallback face.

• Select the text and switch to a font that explicitly supports Arabic.
• If you pasted from a PDF and the letters arrive reversed, the source text is the problem, not Canva (see "Pasting from PDFs" below).

Microsoft Word

Modern Word on Windows and Mac shapes Arabic fine. The usual problems are direction and punctuation:

• Full stops, brackets and question marks land on the wrong end of the line when the paragraph is set left-to-right. Set the paragraph to right-to-left with the RTL button on the Home tab.
• On Windows, Ctrl + Right Shift switches the current paragraph to right-to-left, and Ctrl + Left Shift switches it back.
• If the RTL buttons are missing, add Arabic under File › Options › Language (Windows) and restart Word.
• Use Arabic punctuation where it belongs: the Arabic comma ، and question mark ؟ are different characters from their Latin counterparts.

Google Docs and Slides

Docs and Slides shape Arabic correctly, but the right-to-left paragraph buttons only appear once an RTL language is enabled in your Google account's language settings. After adding Arabic there, reload the document and the buttons appear in the toolbar.

Pasting from PDFs and old websites

Sometimes the app is fine and the text itself is damaged. Many PDFs, and some older websites, store Arabic in visual order (already reversed) or as pre-shaped presentation-form characters. Copy it out, paste it into a modern app, and the app faithfully shapes and reorders it a second time, producing nonsense.

Signs your source is the problem:

• The text looks perfect in the PDF and breaks in every app you paste it into.
• Search inside the PDF can't find Arabic words you can plainly see.

The reliable fix is to retype the text, or copy it from a clean source such as a website, a Word document or a messaging app. For Qur'anic verses, copy from a source that serves real Unicode text rather than from a scanned or image-based PDF.

Choosing a font that actually supports Arabic

Many attractive "Arabic-looking" fonts are Latin fonts drawn to resemble Arabic, and they contain no Arabic letters at all. You need a font that includes the Arabic Unicode block and its shaping rules. Safe, free starting points include Amiri and Scheherazade New for classic Naskh, Reem Kufi for geometric Kufic, Aref Ruqaa for a calligraphic hand, and Cairo or Tajawal for modern UI-style text. Our guide to the best Arabic fonts covers each in detail.

If you plan to add harakat (vowel marks), test them specifically: several display fonts squash or collide diacritics. The harakat guide explains what to look for.

The shortcut: render the Arabic somewhere that shapes it, then place the image

When you can't change the software, such as an old version, a locked-down work machine or an app with no Arabic support, take text out of the equation:

1. Set the Arabic in a tool that shapes it correctly. The Arabify text studio runs entirely in your browser, renders with a full shaping engine and supports harakat.
2. Export a transparent PNG at a generous size.
3. Place the image in your design like any other graphic.

You lose editability, but you gain certainty. It's also the right approach for a one-off logo lockup; our logo maker does the same thing for wordmarks.

A final checklist before you publish

• Run the lām-alif test (ل + ا → لا) in the exact app and file you're exporting from.
• Compare against a known-good rendering, for example the same text in a browser or a phone.
• Check the first and last letters. Reversed text often looks plausible in the middle and gives itself away at the ends.
• Check numbers and Latin words in mixed lines. They are where direction bugs hide.
• Ask someone who reads Arabic to glance at it before it goes to print. It takes them five seconds, and a reprint costs far more.

Sources & further reading

• Unicode Consortium, Arabic code chart (U+0600–U+06FF), the characters that should be in your file.
• Unicode Consortium, ArabicShaping.txt, the joining behaviour that shaping engines implement.
• Adobe Community, Arabic letters not connected in Photoshop, the legacy text-engine fix.
• Adobe Community, Unified Text Engine in Photoshop 23.0, the newer default engine.