> Source: https://txtfetch.com/languages/arabic
> Plain-text twin — every page on txtfetch.com has one. https://txtfetch.com/text

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# Extract text from Arabic documents, in the right order.

A born-digital Arabic file needs no OCR. The real risks are reading order, presentation-form glyphs, and the standard tier's OCR limit, not the script itself.

العربية · Arabic, right-to-left

what-already-works

A born-digital Arabic file, a Word document or a modern PDF with a real text layer, needs no OCR. Tika reads its Unicode text layer directly, in logical reading order, regardless of the right-to-left direction the text displays in.

character-encodings

| encoding | seen in | note |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `Windows-1256 (CP1256)` | Older Arabic Windows software, and legacy email or text exports. | A single-byte Arabic encoding. Read as UTF-8 or Latin-1 by mistake, every Arabic letter corrupts. |

common-pitfalls

**Arabic text extracts in the wrong order, reversed from how it reads.**: Some PDF producers store right-to-left text in visual order, the order the glyphs appear on screen, rather than logical order, the order a reader reads them in. This is a reading-order problem, not a missing-character one. Check the reading-order fix for how to detect and correct it. Fix columns and reading order →

**Arabic letters extract correctly but look like isolated, disconnected forms instead of their normal joined shape.**: Some old PDFs embed Arabic presentation forms, contextual glyph shapes from the Unicode U+FE70 block, instead of the base Arabic letters. Fold presentation-form characters back to their base Arabic letters before using the text for search or comparison.

**Vowel marks (tashkeel) above and below the letters are missing from the extracted text.**: Most everyday Arabic writing, print and digital, omits these marks entirely. Their absence is normal, not a defect. Treat unmarked Arabic as the expected form. Extraction can't add marks that were never in the source.

chunking-and-tokens

Arabic words are separated by spaces, so a word-count chunker splits Arabic text in roughly the right places. Presentation-form ligatures and the right-to-left layout don't change that word count, only the glyph shapes. The chunk previewer's ~4-characters-per-token estimate is a reasonable starting point for Arabic.

ocr-status

The standard OCR tier ships English trained data plus script detection only (TESSDATA\_LANGS=eng osd). Latin-trained OCR data cannot read Arabic letterforms, since the shapes share almost nothing with the Latin alphabet. For any scanned or photographed Arabic document, request quality=premium, which routes a vision-language model instead of Tika. No accuracy figure is published for Arabic OCR under either tier. If Arabic scans are a large part of your workload, contact us before you commit to a plan.

faq

**Does txtfetch detect or label the document's language?**: No. txtfetch extracts the text as written and hands it back as-is. It does not detect, tag, or translate a document's language. There is no language parameter to set.

**Can txtfetch OCR a scanned Arabic document?**: Not reliably with the standard tier, which ships English trained data plus script detection only (TESSDATA_LANGS=eng osd). Request quality=premium for the documented route to reading an Arabic scan.

**Why does my Arabic text come out in the wrong order?**: Some PDF producers store right-to-left text in visual, on-screen order rather than logical reading order. This is a reading-order issue, addressed in the fix for columns and reading order.

**Why are the vowel marks missing from my extracted Arabic text?**: Most Arabic writing omits tashkeel vowel marks in the source document itself. Their absence in the extracted text reflects the source, not a loss during extraction.

related-reading

-   [Fix garbled text from the wrong encoding →](https://txtfetch.com/fixes/mojibake-wrong-encoding)
-   [What comes back: text, Markdown, or JSON →](https://txtfetch.com/output)
-   [Glossary: reading order →](https://txtfetch.com/glossary/reading-order)
-   [Contact →](https://txtfetch.com/contact)
-   [Get an API key →](https://app.txtfetch.com/signup)

other-languages

-   [Spanish →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/spanish)
-   [French →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/french)
-   [German →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/german)
-   [Portuguese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/portuguese)
-   [Japanese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/japanese)
-   [Chinese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/chinese)
-   [Korean →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/korean)
-   [Russian →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/russian)
-   [All languages →](https://txtfetch.com/languages)

## Check your Arabic scan first.

The free scan check tells you if a page needs OCR. It runs in your browser.

[Check a scan →](https://txtfetch.com/tools/image-ocr-check)

[Get an API key →](https://app.txtfetch.com/signup)