Why is software still built like billions don't exist in 2026?

8 pointsyerushalayim2mo ago9 comments

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?

9 comments

Antibabelic2mo ago

Because most software comes from Anglophone or at least Western markets, who often don't even suspect problems like this might pop up for customers in other countries.

Unfortunately, it is generally up to the local developers to provide solutions, and they are often not up to the task. For example, Affinity Designer had poor RTL support for the longest time, due to certain assumptions built into their text rendering engine from the start. But making an equally featureful alternative with better support for these scripts would be a monumental task.

yerushalayimOP2mo ago

You’re right that a lot of software comes out of Anglophone or Western contexts, but that’s exactly why these issues persist. The problem isn’t that RTL is “hard” — it’s that most text engines, layout systems, and PDF toolkits were originally architected with implicit LTR assumptions baked deep into the rendering pipeline.

Once those assumptions are embedded in things like glyph ordering, bidi resolution, cursor movement, hit‑testing, line breaking, and font fallback, fixing RTL becomes a retrofit instead of a design principle. By the time a team realizes the gap, the shaping and layout stack is so tightly coupled that adding proper bidi handling feels like a massive rewrite.

You see this pattern everywhere: PDFium (used by all Chromium browsers), various UI frameworks, and even some OS‑level text components still mishandle RTL in 2026. The symptoms are always the same — disappearing text, reversed glyph order, broken cursor navigation, or failure to commit text at all.

This isn’t a niche corner case. Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and other RTL scripts represent hundreds of millions of daily users. The real issue is that global language support is still treated as optional rather than foundational, and the technical debt from those early assumptions keeps compounding.

Juliate2mo ago

Even basic local names in Western contexts (with characters other than just [a-zA-Z0-9_\ ]) cannot be properly and consistently input or searched in most of corporate or retail software, at the basic text level, because they rely on broken assumptions that even modern ERPs still follow. I routinely sift through 3 or 4 different spellings of my name every time someone asks for my name in their systems.

I cannot imagine the nightmare it must be for non-western languages.

I don't know exactly what the real, hard incentive is to make it happen at last, as this needs a strong perspective over software as a tool to serve people, as well as some kind of artistic literacy: we need more people to care about the tools they build, and more people to pay the makers because of that. Steve Jobs, with all his downsides, had this kind of focus and impact. But this needs to be systemic, not exceptional.

2 more replies

tacostakohashi2mo ago

You seem to be mixing up right-to-left and "non English". Lots of non-english languages are not RTL and work great, notably European and Asian languages.

The right-to-left scripts/languages are relatively esoteric, and their market share probably rounds down to 0 for Google.

aristofun2mo ago

Until recently it was not worth the effort to even bother identifying problems like this. For many markets and fields it is still not worth the effort because most profit on those areas come from LTR based nations

FrankWilhoit2mo ago

If product A can sell 50 million units and product B can sell 49 million units, product B will not be produced.

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