If you’ve ever typed Arabic into a PDF form and seen the letters come out separated and in the wrong order, you’re not alone. The same thing happens with Urdu, and Hindi or Punjabi text often shows vowel signs in the wrong place. The problem isn’t you or your keyboard. Most PDF editors were built for English.

Why the letters break

Arabic and Urdu are written right to left, and each letter changes shape depending on whether it’s at the start, middle or end of a word. Software has to “shape” the text, joining the letters correctly, and lay out each line from right to left. Editors that skip this step place each letter on its own, left to right.

Hindi (Devanagari) and Punjabi (Gurmukhi) have their own rules: some vowel signs are typed after a consonant but drawn before it, and consonants combine into conjuncts. Without proper shaping, these appear in the wrong order or as separate pieces.

Doing it properly, free, in your browser

Our free language-specific PDF editors handle the shaping for you:

With the Arabic editor, for example, you get correctly joined letters, right-to-left lines and a choice of Arabic fonts, including Cairo, Tajawal, Almarai, Amiri and the Noto Arabic families. Your file opens in your browser and is never uploaded, which matters for personal documents.

Step by step

Open your PDF by dropping it on the editor.
Click where the text should go. The Add text tool starts with a font for the language.
Type or paste your text. Change the font, size, colour or alignment in the bar above the page.
Download. Your text is saved in the PDF as real, selectable text, not an image.

Tips for forms and official documents

Check names letter by letter after typing. Copying from another document can bring hidden formatting characters with it.
For mixed text (an English address inside an Arabic sentence, say), type each part in its own text box if the order looks wrong.
If a form has fillable fields, try our Fill PDF Form tool, and use Sign PDF to add a signature.

More free PDF tools

The full PDF Editor also edits existing text, adds images, highlights and comments. Need to combine or shrink files? See Merge PDF, Compress PDF and the rest of our PDF tools. And if you need posters or flyers in these languages, our online designer has Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi poster makers.