RTL and multilingual text compositor for photo editors

A designer working in Arabic, Hebrew, or Farsi opens Photoshop or Affinity Photo to add text to an image and immediately hits the same broken experience: characters render in the wrong order, the cursor behaves erratically, there's no ligature support for Arabic script, and switching between English and Arabic mid-caption requires workarounds that corrupt the text layer. One user put it plainly: 'there is a need to shift between English and other languages (Arabic in my case) font.' This isn't a niche complaint — Arabic alone is a top-five language on the internet, and the design market serving Arabic-speaking businesses is substantial.

The gap persists for a specific structural reason: RTL text rendering requires deep integration with the OS text shaping engine (HarfBuzz or CoreText), and photo editors are built around pixel manipulation, not text shaping. Bolting on proper BiDi (bidirectional text) support is genuinely hard engineering work that doesn't move the needle for the majority Western user base that drives review scores and renewal decisions. So vendors ship minimal RTL support — enough to claim it exists, not enough to actually work.

What's broken in practice: Arabic words disconnect into individual letters instead of joining as proper ligatures, text alignment options default to LTR logic, and mixing Arabic and Latin in a single text block produces character-ordering chaos that has to be manually patched. Designers serving Arabic-speaking clients currently export the base image and use separate native OS tools or web-based workarounds to composite the Arabic text — then flatten and re-import. This is a recurring workflow cost on every single project.

The business case is clear: there are thousands of design studios and freelancers serving the Gulf, Levant, and North Africa markets who do this workaround on every deliverable. A standalone compositor that takes a flattened or layered image, provides a proper Arabic/Hebrew/BiDi text layer with ligature support and correct rendering, and exports a merged file or returns a transparent text layer, solves a recurring, measurable problem for a buyer who currently has no good option.

What to build

Build a desktop app that accepts an image file (PSD, PNG, JPEG), renders properly shaped Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi text with full ligature and BiDi support using HarfBuzz, lets the designer position and style text layers visually, and exports either a flattened image or a transparent PNG text layer that can be re-imported into any editor.

Where to start

Start with Saudi Arabia and UAE-based freelancers on design marketplaces who consistently get flagged for poor Arabic typography — reach them through Arabic-language design forums and YouTube tutorials where the BiDi workaround is already a frequently discussed pain.

The hard part

Distribution is the hard problem — this audience is geographically and linguistically fragmented, and reaching them without a physical presence or Arabic-language marketing content means CAC is high and word-of-mouth is slow to cross regional boundaries.

How it makes money

Subscription at $15/month per seat, with a studio tier at $40/month for up to five users — priced below what an hour of rework time costs, which makes the purchase decision easy.