Why is my Arabic text backwards in Photoshop?

Because Middle Eastern composition is not enabled. Without it, Photoshop lays characters out left to right in the order it receives them, which displays an Arabic word reversed.

Why are the Arabic letters separated?

Arabic letters change shape by position and join to their neighbours. With no shaping engine, each letter is drawn in its isolated form, which reads as detached letters.

Do I need an Arabic edition of Photoshop?

No. Support has shipped for years — you only have to enable it in preferences and restart the application.

Writing Arabic in Photoshop: why the letters detach, and how to fix it

You paste an Arabic word into Photoshop and get ﻡ ﻼ ﺳ instead of سلام: backwards, every letter on its own. The instinct is to change the font, then the keyboard, then to go looking for an "Arabic version" of the software. None of the three is the problem.

What is actually happening

Two separate mechanisms, usually confused because they break together.

Order. Arabic is written right to left but stored in logical order — first letter spoken, first in memory. Displaying it right to left is the text engine's job, via the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. Without it, Photoshop dutifully lays characters out left to right and the word comes out reversed.

Joining. Each Arabic letter has up to four forms depending on position — isolated, initial, medial, final — and connects to its neighbour. Picking the right form is a shaping engine's job. Without one, every letter is drawn isolated: ﺎ ﺑ instead of اب.

An Arabic font does neither. It supplies the drawings; it does not decide order or joining.

The setting, once

In Photoshop:

Preferences → Type (Edit → Preferences on Windows, Photoshop → Settings on macOS).
Under Middle Eastern and South Asian type options, choose Middle Eastern and South Asian.
Restart Photoshop. The setting does not apply while it is running.
In the Paragraph panel, select the Middle Eastern composer and right alignment.
Use a font that actually contains Arabic — Adobe Arabic, Noto Naskh Arabic, Cairo. A Latin font has no Arabic glyphs, so the application substitutes another, usually badly.

Illustrator and InDesign: same logic, same place in preferences. It is the same underlying text engine.

Two details that catch people afterwards

Digits. The Paragraph panel offers Arabic-Indic digits (١٢٣) or Latin ones (123). The choice is stylistic and regional — the Maghreb mostly uses 123, the Mashriq ١٢٣. Decide before you set the text, not after.

Kashida. Arabic justification is traditionally achieved by stretching the joins, not by spacing words apart. Photoshop exposes a kashida setting inside justification; left at maximum on a short line it produces ugly elastic words.

If the text is already broken

This is the common case: the text passed through software with no Arabic support, or came out of a PDF, and arrives already reversed and already in isolated forms. Turning the engine back on does not repair it — the damage is in the characters themselves.

Two operations, in this order:

Map the presentation forms back to base letters. Forms like ﺎ ﺑ live in a separate Unicode block (Arabic Presentation Forms) and should never appear in stored text.
Restore the order, mirroring brackets and quotation marks, which read the other way round once the string is flipped.

Our Arabic text repair tool does both: paste the broken text, get correct Arabic back, and paste it into the layout once the engine is enabled.

And if you have no Arabic keyboard to type it in the first place, the online Arabic keyboard lets you type in Latin letters — salam gives سلام — and copy the result.

The order of operations

Enable Middle Eastern composition, restart, pick an Arabic font, then type or paste. In that order nothing breaks. Text set before enabling stays broken: it has to be repaired and pasted back.