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With the new funds as resources, does this mean people like me who are interested in RTL Languages will be more of a strong reality in the very soon future as opposed to the usual Serif replies of "having to reprogram from the grounds up because RTL language support" is a complex process? They missed out a huge opportunity to potentially capture the market share in India, Arabic Diaspora, Hebrew, and East Asian (Mandation, Japanese, Etc). Regardless of this news, can we also remember the company's kindness and understanding during the pandemic? Serif for the longest time discounted their softwares to 50%. Does anyone remember this? I have privately expressed my grievances towards Affinity and I refuse to upgrade to any of their software until they include the RTL Languages. For my needs, Publisher 1.X has served me well and will continue to do so. I am a current Adobe CC Photography Plan member and also continue to be perpetual license holder of Capture one 16.3.X. Their Black Friday deal of 50% off the perpetual license was too good to pass up! These fees (to me) are cost of doing business and I'll simply adjust my fees accordingly. Can we be little bit more optimistic and hopeful?!

RTL text is a line composing convention, not a font format. If Serif wants Affinity Designer to be used by a lot more people globally they'll need to support Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and other scripts. Let's not forget about vertical text used in nations like Japan. But that's a different matter than support of font formats. Variable fonts are not going away. The OTF Variable format is already far more successful than the Type 1 Multiple Master and TrueType GX formats from the 1990's. I use variable fonts frequently in my design work. Whenever I'm considering to buy a new typeface package I'll check to see if it includes any variable fonts as well as how many variable axes it includes. It's just as much a selling point as a typeface having an expanded character set with lots of OpenType features.

It's ridiculous to me that something as basic as right to left text isn't a built in feature. Even a basic notepad can handle right to left text. I found this plugin that seems to fix it, I expect by converting RTL text to unicode. Affinity Designer and Publisher is unusable for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Azeri and Hebrew because they are all RTL scripts. It collectively excludes a billion people. It's a massive oversight.

In this video I share with you how to fix RTL on Affinity Designer but its work Publisher and Photo as well, Free Fix Download Link: https://leomoon.com/downloads/desktop-apps/leomoon-parsinegar/ Enjoy!

@mehdy, Salam! I also support you for wanting Serif to have added RTL language support and major Indic languages from the Indian subcontinent. Correct me if I am wrong, but I read something that an OLDER now deprecated software from Serif support RTL, but their newer coded from the grounds up Affinity do not. This is like a "kick in the stomach" sort of feeling. Anyways...yeah. Serif made a HUGE mistake, because of all the potential customers in Arabic-speaking countries, Hebrew-speaking people, and the many Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam speakers of India as potential customers.

After years of begging, and multiple posts and negatives reviews, Serif insists on denying support for Arabic/Hebrew writing. Every release you tell me that the feature is coming, and it is on your roadmap. Kindly, I would like to ask for a refund for my V2 purchases as I am reaching a dead-end with this. I am sticking to Adobe Suite even though it is not free just to use this writing. Thank you for continuous efforts to disappointment. Gmail - Arabic and RTL Support.pdf

Greetings, it seems the RTL text support is missing for Hebrew and Arabic languages when using Text Tool The letters are in reverse order LTR, can this please be fixed ?

As someone who is learning Hindi Devanagari (reading and writing), I will happily take the support of Indic LTR support in V2, which should also include suppose for Dravidian-based languages of South India: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, etc. The Devanagari script is used by Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. I had a good chuckle perusing how much that thread was derailed and went off topic. It's entertainment to kill time until V2 is officially announced. Maybe in V3, there will support for RTL for Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, and several scripts used in China.

I don't think it is due to "incompetence" from Serif. The real (and probable) is the lack or resources/research and name recognition. If Adobe representative contacted to notify AMD about such bug, I think AMD would get on finding a solution ASAP due to the enormous(!!!) professional market share that Adobe has. As an owner of Publisher, which I use as a hobby for mainly creating collages for my personal cooking project, Serif can put "professional" at every other word for their Affinity Suite of products. As long as it lacks widespread real-professional adoption and not from hobbyists or part timers, these large GPU companies—nVIDIA and AMD—only see Serif as that "alternative/wannabe" company. If you mention the Affinity Suite not having proper right-to-left (RTL) support for Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and several other support for Indic (languages spoken in India and the Indian Diaspora), that is incompetence. Us Publisher users have been begging(!!!) Serif to bring us proper support for footnotes/endnotes/etc and after all these years is silence. That is incompetence. I digress. The saying goes—you get what you pay for. I remain hopeful; Version 2.0 is forthcoming. This is confirmed/verified by an already existence of 2.0 Beta albeit in private testing as reported by AEC Magazine. Let's hope version 2.0 will be surprise for all of us.

Just to reply as a form of solidarity and voting for the proper and full support of RTL languages, especially Arabic and Farsi. I am currently learning Farsi for the purpose of culinary purposes and as mentioned previously and many...many times...Serif needs to somehow add Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu as these are the major Middle Eastern languages with potential to poach users away from Adobe products. My Hindi Devanagari is stronger than my Farsi. I've expressed my disappointment with the lack of proper Indic languages in Affinity trio of products. Indic languages are LTR and should be "more easier" to adapt and implement than RTL. I have to use the Glyph Browser and fix certain merging of Hindi alphabets (as an example). When entering Farsi, say for typing out names of Persian Food, I have to use the glyph and find the specific glyph that corresponds with the alphabet's position. It's cumbersome, but for my use (and needs), it is a band-aid fix. If not for version 1.X, I and many others who are of RTL and LTR languages would like to have this in version 2. Heck, maybe raise the price a little bit. Even with a few raise in price, still BEATS renting software from Adobe!!!

Hi, Can you please consider supporting RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic? As a Hebrew speaker, I have to write texts In my designs backwards, which makes me frustrated, and I know there are many other people who would like to get this feature. I use affinity design & photo for around 3 years, and that's the only con I found compared to Adobe's programs. I know that many rtl-languages speakers don't buy Affinity suit just because of this reason.

Figma now has support for RTL fonts (for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew etc.) and has supported variable fonts — through a plug-in — for some time already. Over the last few years I’ve been a big Affinity fan, and supporter, but Affinity is slipping behind when it comes to typography (there are still some rough edges with font support, especially for those with lots of alternatives and contextual features). Type is central to what most of us use Affinity applications for (especially Publisher) and I’d like to see their type handling be ahead of the curve, rather than perpetually languishing behind it.

That’s not an issue here. Hindi is written left to right, and a quick search on the Interwebs reveals that Cebuano is, too. For the sake of completeness, there are only twelve RTL languages: Arabic Aramaic Azeri Divehi Fula Hebrew Kurdish N'ko Persian Rohingya Syriac Urdu

Please search for the forums before adding new threads: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65525-right-to-left-support-for-hebrew-and-arabic/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/157159-arabic-language-support/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78209-fix-rtl-for-arabic-persian-and-hebrew-languages/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/145244-hebrew-arabic-right-to-left-text-input-support/ etc. etc. See this recent response from a Serif member of staff: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78209-fix-rtl-for-arabic-persian-and-hebrew-languages/page/10/&tab=comments#comment-787961

We absolutely need Hebrew, Arabic RTL functionality.

I absolutely need this. Probably in the past this was not an issue but with a broader customer base and support, we absolutely need Hebrew, Arabic RTL functionality.

For limited amounts of RTL Hebrew inserted into a LTR text (like English), I've had good luck with this simple procedure: Prepare the text in a Word Processor that supports RTL Unicode text (like LibreOffice Writer or MS Word). Often for my purposes I just cut and paste Hebrew text from a Bible programme that supports Unicode. Use this website to flip it around: https://onlineunicodetools.com/reverse-unicode Cut and paste the resulting text into AP. Perhaps this will work for some other RTL languages, though I know it won't work right for Arabic. And I'm sure it's not a good solution when the entire document must be RTL. Edit: I noted after posting this that the accent marks aren't actually in the right place, though the vowel points are. It's simple enough to create the text without the accents, or to move them manually in short segments of text.

I'm not native in an RTL language, but my job nearly always includes Arabic, Hebrew and Persian versions of the text. Speaking of non-Roman languages, Chinese and Japanese are two other languages that are always needed. It seems that multi-lingual support is no longer simply an option, in an interconnected world. I'm surprised this is not a top priority in the Affinity set. Paolo

As far as I’m aware, it was purely the development/technical side of things. WinSoft International created custom versions of PagePlus and two other Serif applications that allowed the user to work in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and a couple of other RTL languages, but their agreement only covered the X5 versions and wasn’t extended beyond that.

I tested RTL Fixer by ArtWayz in VectorStyler with Hebrew and Arabic and it worked. I just needed to add the app name to the app list that RTL Fixer need to interact.

Some food for thought… I don't understand, read or write Arabic, Hebrew or Persian at all, thus I haven't even used any RTL yet. But from the strictly technical point of view, the following workaround might theoretically allow you to use "fake RTL" as live text in Affinity, now. Inspired by another thread, I had the following idea: All you need is a font editor (I have TypeTool 3 but any other should do). flip all characters in your favorite RTL font you might also need to adjust some other font parameters correspondingly, hinting, kerning, whatever… save the font under a new name; you really should know what you're doing to avoid OS font conflicts activate your new flipped font create a text frame in Affinity flip the text frame start typing RTL using your flipped font Anyone brave enough to experiment with it further…?

Sorry to bump into this... but do guys aware of RTL Fixer? It is the best solution for writing in right-to-left languages on software that doesn’t support it. (like Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher). The app is now extremely feature rich and supports pretty much all right-to-left languages, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew and more. If you want more information: https://www.rtlfixer.com

Sorry to bump into this... but do guys aware of RTL Fixer? It is the best solution for writing in right-to-left languages on software that doesn’t support it. (like Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher). The app is now extremely feature rich and supports pretty much all right-to-left languages, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew and more. If you want more information: https://www.rtlfixer.com

Sorry to bump into this... but do guys aware of RTL Fixer? It is the best solution for writing in right-to-left languages on software that doesn’t support it. (like Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher). The app is now extremely feature rich and supports pretty much all right-to-left languages, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew and more. If you want more information: https://www.rtlfixer.com

I fully endorse the calls for RTL support in the Affinity apps, but there have been many threads about this and it has been made abundantly clear to us that such a feature will not be added in the near future. Serif added support for Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and one or two other RTL language for version X5 of some of their ‘legacy’ software products, but they depended on outside help and they dropped the feature for subsequent releases.