We had an issue with generating Arabic text in PDFs with DITA OT and FOP. If you read Arabic, you'll know that the words are not correctly formed with the proper intermediate letter forms and connections.

We were able to fix this in DITA OT 3.6.1 by overriding the attributes of <fo:root> with our plugin to remove xml:lang. This introduced other issues like warnings about missing language attributes and there is no language specified in the PDF, but it generated correct Arabic text.

We upgraded to DITA OT 3.7.1 with FOP 2.6, and the Arabic text problem is happening again. The override in our plugin to remove xml:lang no longer works. Setting xml:lang in our source files to "ar" doesn't work. We even tried adding script and language attributes to <fo:root> to no avail. We also notice that the text direction in the PDF isn't correctly set to right-to-left even though we specified it in <fo:root>.

Any advice on how to get correctly generated Arabic PDFs with DITA OT 3.7.1 is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt Stern
Sr. Principal Technical Writer
Kofax