Story

I ran into a surprisingly fundamental problem while editing a PDF: typing a full line of right‑to‑left text (Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) into a browser PDF editor looks fine while typing, but the moment you click outside the text box, the entire line disappears. Only tiny fragments survive.

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?