HN Explorer

Why is software still built like billions don't exist in 2026?

8 points by yerushalayim ↗ HN
I ran into a surprisingly fundamental problem while editing a PDF: typing a full line of right‑to‑left text (Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) into a browser PDF editor looks fine while typing, but the moment you click outside the text box, the entire line disappears. Only tiny fragments survive.

What’s wild is that this isn’t limited to one browser — it happens across multiple Chromium‑based PDF editors because they all inherit the same underlying behavior. It’s 2026, and somehow the most widely used browser engine still can’t reliably commit a line of RTL text into a PDF.

This isn’t a niche corner case. Billions of people use non‑English scripts every day. Yet basic text handling in PDFs — one of the most common document formats on the planet — still breaks in ways that feel like the 1990s.

I know PDF internals are messy, but it’s still surprising that something this fundamental remains broken across so many tools. Anyone else run into this?

4 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] thread
Antibabelic
Because most software comes from Anglophone or at least Western markets, who often don't even suspect problems like this might pop up for customers in other countries.

Unfortunately, it is generally up to the local developers to provide solutions, and they are often not up to the task. For example, Affinity Designer had poor RTL support for the longest time, due to certain assumptions built into their text rendering engine from the start. But making an equally featureful alternative with better support for these scripts would be a monumental task.

FrankWilhoit
If product A can sell 50 million units and product B can sell 49 million units, product B will not be produced.
aristofun
Until recently it was not worth the effort to even bother identifying problems like this. For many markets and fields it is still not worth the effort because most profit on those areas come from LTR based nations
tacostakohashi
You seem to be mixing up right-to-left and "non English". Lots of non-english languages are not RTL and work great, notably European and Asian languages.

The right-to-left scripts/languages are relatively esoteric, and their market share probably rounds down to 0 for Google.