Arabic text comes out backwards when you copy it from a PDF? Here is why and how to fix it
Last updated 27 September 2026
You copy a paragraph of Arabic out of a PDF, paste it into Word, and the letters come out in reverse, the words in the wrong order, or المدرسة becomes املدرسة. The PDF looks perfect, so it is not your fault, and it can be fixed.
Why it happens
A PDF does not store sentences. It stores letters and where each one is drawn on the page. Many programs store Arabic letters in the order they are drawn, left to right, and store the joined-up shape of each letter rather than the letter itself. Copying then gives you the letters backwards, or shapes that a search box cannot find.
Files made by printing to PDF from Chrome have their own mistakes: brackets come out facing the wrong way, and the joined lam and meem of words like المدرسة come out reversed.
Get the text the right way round
- Open Fix copied Arabic text and drop the PDF.
- Press Fix the text. Each line is put back together right to left, and letter shapes are turned back into normal letters.
- Read the text in the box. If the words are still backwards, press Words still backwards? Turn them round.
- Press Copy it all and paste it where you need it, or press Save the text file.
English words and numbers inside an Arabic line keep their own left-to-right order.
If it says no Arabic text was found
Then the pages are scans or photos, and the words are pictures with no letters stored at all. No tool can copy them, only read them with OCR, and the OCR on this site reads English letters only. For a scanned Arabic page, the words have to be typed again.
If you need the layout too
The fix gives you plain text. To keep the tables and layout of the page, try PDF to Word and check the Arabic there. For a long document, fixing the text first and pasting it into your own Word file is often the quicker road.