Why do Arabic watermarks come out with separated, reversed letters on other sites?
Because a PDF has no text engine to join or order letters. The tool writing the mark has to turn each letter into its correct form, initial, medial or final, and order the word right to left before drawing it. Many tools skip that step and print isolated letters backwards. This watermark tool shapes and orders the text and embeds IBM Plex Sans Arabic in the file, so the mark displays and prints correctly.
What goes wrong in other tools
In a browser or in Word you type the Arabic word for 'secret' and the software handles everything: it knows the first letter takes one form at the start of a word, the middle letter does not join what follows, and the last letter takes a third form, and it knows the word runs from the right. A PDF knows none of this. It draws the shapes it is told to draw, in the order it is given, left to right.
So when a tool hands it the letters exactly as typed, with no shaping and no reordering, you get the letters of the word isolated and in reverse. Sometimes empty boxes appear instead, when the font in use has no Arabic at all.
What this tool does
- It splits the text into Arabic and Latin runs and works out each run's direction using the rules for bidirectional text.
- It orders the runs the way they must appear to the eye, left to right across the page.
- It turns every Arabic letter into its correct joined form using the font's own rules.
- It embeds IBM Plex Sans Arabic in the file, so the display does not depend on fonts installed on the reader's device and looks the same on a phone, a computer and on paper.
The result is that a phrase such as the Arabic for 'strictly confidential', or your store name, comes out of PDF watermark exactly as you typed it, joined and in the right direction, at any angle and in any placement.
Honest limits
- Diacritics: fatha, damma and shadda do appear, but can sit slightly off their ideal position. Without diacritics you will not notice anything.
- Copy and paste: the mark is real text inside the file. Copy it out and paste it elsewhere and the letters may land in a different order, as happens with Arabic in most PDFs. What is displayed and printed is correct.
- Characters the font does not cover, such as emoji, are replaced with a question mark, and the tool tells you how many.
And for product photos?
If your mark goes on photos rather than a PDF, Image watermark editor writes the text onto the image itself in the browser, and the browser handles Arabic shaping on its own.
Common questions
Can I pick a different font?
No. The tool uses IBM Plex Sans Arabic in two weights, regular and bold. That is what guarantees correct shaping every time.
Do Arabic-Indic digits work in the mark?
Yes. The font covers both Arabic-Indic and Western digits, and they are drawn as you type them in the text field.