Comment 19 for bug 212491

> * Are you sure that this works as well for Arabic as it does for
> Hebrew? I don't read or write either language, but I've worked with
> people who do, and I'm told that Arabic script needs a shaping
> algorithm to apply connections between letters. Without shaping, my
> understanding is that it looks amateurish at best and is likely to be
> difficult to read.

Yes, Arabic glyphs do need shaping handling; fortunately, the shaping algorithm is very simple (the shape is determined almost entirely by the letter's position within the word) and separate Unicode codepoints are available for each of the glyphs, so "pre-composed" strings are possible. IMHO it's probably worth making sure the text is right-way-round as a first step, even if the shaping still needs to be implemented.