Blender can’t shape Arabic. Type Arabic into a text object and you get isolated, reversed letters. The usual workaround — pushing the string through a “reshaper” that swaps characters for Unicode Arabic presentation forms (U+FE70–U+FEFF) — breaks on most modern Arabic fonts, because those fonts don’t ship that legacy block at all anymore.
I got tired of hand-modelling Arabic titles, so I built Arabic Text Studio.
It shapes the text with HarfBuzz — the same shaping engine behind Blender’s own UI, Chrome, Photoshop and Illustrator — and then builds real Blender curve objects from the shaped outlines. Not a mesh import and not a font hack: curves you extrude, bevel, animate and assign materials to like any other text object.
What it does
- Correct initial / medial / final letterforms, ligatures, kerning and harakat positioning
- Works with any Arabic font, including fonts with zero presentation forms
- Bidi — mixed Arabic + Latin + numbers comes out in the right visual order
- Merge Overlaps — connected letters welded into one clean outline, no holes at the joins
- Batch mode — paste a list, get one object per line, arranged in rows, columns or a grid
- Split to words or letters, with per-piece origins under a group empty, ready to animate
- Re-editable — the source text and settings live on the object; hit Edit Text and it reshapes in place
- Live geometry controls across a whole selection: extrude, bevel, outline offset, resolution
Compatibility
Blender 4.2+ as a one-click extension. All libraries are bundled for Windows, macOS and Linux — no pip and no internet access needed at install time. A legacy build for Blender 3.6–4.1 is included.
Available on Gumroad: https://noqta3d.gumroad.com/l/arabic-text-studio
Happy to answer anything here. If you have an Arabic font that gives you trouble, post it in this thread and I’ll test it and report back.