Why your Arabic CV comes out broken in PDF — and how to fix it for ATS

Failure 1 — letters that don't connect

Arabic is a cursive script: most letters change shape depending on whether they're at the start, middle, or end of a word, or standing alone — up to four forms per letter. A font renders this correctly using a shaping table (technically its GSUB table) that the software has to actually apply. Tools built primarily for Latin-script layout sometimes skip this step, or apply it inconsistently across a PDF export pipeline, and the result is Arabic text where letters that should join sit as separate, disconnected shapes — readable with effort, but visibly wrong, and a clear signal to anyone Arabic-literate that the document wasn't produced properly.

How to check: zoom into your exported PDF at 200%. A word like كتاب should render as one connected shape. If you see what looks like separate letters sitting apart, the shaping broke.

Failure 2 — text you can't select or search

This one is less visible and more damaging. Some tools that struggle with Arabic shaping sidestep the problem entirely by rendering the text as a flattened image inside the PDF — it can look perfect, because it's a picture of the correctly shaped text, not the text itself. The catch: there's no real text layer underneath. You can't select it, you can't search it, and an Applicant Tracking System — the software many employers use to parse a CV before a human ever opens it — extracts nothing at all. It sees a document with no readable text and either discards it or ranks it at the bottom.

How to check: try to select a word in your exported PDF with your cursor, or press Cmd+F / Ctrl+F and search for a word you know is in it. If nothing highlights, you have an image, not text.

Failure 3 — layout an ATS can't follow

ATS software generally reads a PDF's text in a rough top-to-bottom, reading-direction order. A CV built with a sidebar, multiple columns, or tables to organise sections looks fine to a human eye, but many parsers read across the page rather than down a column — so a two-column CV can come out with a job title from the left column glued to a date from the right column, in an order that makes no sense. Single-column, table-free layouts are the safest structure specifically because there's only one possible reading order.

Failure 4 — numbers and dates that flip

Arabic reads right-to-left, but phone numbers, email addresses, and most date formats are written left-to-right even inside an Arabic sentence — a mix known as bidirectional (bidi) text. Software that doesn't apply the bidi algorithm correctly can reverse these runs, so a phone number embedded in an Arabic paragraph comes out with the digits in the wrong order, or an email address gets mangled. This is a common, specific failure — worth testing on its own even if the rest of your Arabic text looks fine.

A quick self-check for any CV you already have

• Zoom test — does every Arabic word look like one connected shape, not separate letters?
• Select test — can you click-and-drag to select a sentence of Arabic text?
• Search test — does Cmd+F / Ctrl+F find a word you know is in the document?
• Number test — does your phone number read left-to-right and in the right order inside the Arabic paragraph around it?

If any of these fail, an ATS is very likely failing to read your CV the same way, regardless of how it looks on your screen.

Frequently asked questions