Taggart
Arabic PDF accessibility software
Find and repair what breaks Arabic PDFs — text stored backwards, no language, left-to-right columns — without changing the page, and what is not fixed yet.
Why Arabic PDFs fail quietly
Arabic PDFs fail the way Hebrew ones do. Many producers store each line in visual order — reversed in advance and painted left to right — so the page looks perfect while copy, search and screen readers get it backwards. Many leave the document’s language as English, so a screen reader reads Arabic in an English voice. And auto-tagging walks two-column pages the wrong way.
PDF/UA and the Matterhorn Protocol test none of this. A reversed Arabic file can pass veraPDF, PAC and Acrobat’s checker and still be unusable. The Arabic failures in detail →
What Taggart does with an Arabic document
Finds visual order, line by line. It compares the direction each line was painted in with its position on the page, and checks Arabic’s position-locked forms — ة and ى at word ends, the article ال at word starts. Each line is shown as stored, in logical order, with the evidence. Weak evidence means undecided, shown to you, never counted as fine.
Repairs the order without touching the page. The logical text goes into ActualText with the language set to Arabic, and every repaired page is compared with the original at structural similarity ≥ 0.999. A page justified with kashidas looks exactly as it did.
Writes letters, not shaped glyphs. A producer that stored each letter in its positional form — ﻛ for ك — and stretched lines with tatweel gets back text a reader can search: the presentation forms folded to the letters, the tatweel dropped. The folding happens after the reversal, because the lam-alef ligature ﻻ is two letters, and folded first it would reverse into ال, “the”, where the document says لا, “no”.
Proposes a right-to-left reading order for pages read the wrong way — right column first — as a change you accept.
Reads scanned Arabic with OCR on the scanned pages only.
What it does not do yet
It is worth being exact, because Arabic is where tools overclaim most:
- Presentation forms in a file already in logical order. The normalisation rides on the repair of a line’s order, so a file stored the right way round but in presentation forms is left as it is. The normalisation step for that case →
- Rule explanations are not in Arabic. The interface is; the per-condition explanations appear in English.
- No alternate text is written for you, in any language.
Try it
Check an Arabic file free — no account, up to 60 pages — and open the right-to-left tab. If it reports lines as undecided, that is the tool telling you what it does not know, which is the behaviour you want from anything that reads a script for you.
Frequently asked questions
What breaks in Arabic PDFs?
The same three things as in Hebrew — text stored in visual order, no language declaration, columns read left to right — plus two of Arabic's own: letters stored as presentation forms, the shaped glyph variants, which break search; and tatweel, the justification character, left in the text. PDF/UA tests none of them.
How does Taggart tell that Arabic is stored backwards?
From two independent signals. The direction the producer painted each line in, compared with its position on the page. And Arabic's position-locked forms: taa marbuta ة and alif maqsura ى only end a word, and the definite article ال only begins one — reversed, it turns up as لا at the end. Lines where the two disagree or say little are reported as undecided.
Does it fix presentation forms and tatweel?
In every line it repairs, yes. The text it writes is folded back from presentation forms to the letters — after the reversal, so the lam-alef ligature comes out as ل then ا — and tatweel is removed. A file stored in the right order but in presentation forms needs no repair of its order, and is not yet normalised on its own.
Is the interface in Arabic?
Yes. The application runs in Arabic, right to left, alongside nine other languages. Rule explanations are in English and Hebrew; the Arabic interface shows them in English.
Related guides
- Arabic PDF accessibility: what breaks and whyArabic adds contextual letter shaping and ligatures on top of every right-to-left problem Hebrew has. What that does to extracted text, and how to check it.
- Hebrew or Arabic text reversed when copied from a PDFYou copy a line of Hebrew or Arabic out of a PDF and it pastes backwards. Why it happens, a ten-second test that tells file from app, and how to fix it.
- ActualText in PDF: what it is and when to use itActualText changes what a PDF says without changing how it looks. When it is the right fix, how it differs from Alt, and the mistakes that silence text.
Run your own file through it. The validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, and no account at all up to 60 pages — so you can see exactly what you are dealing with before deciding anything.
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