RTL not working in pdf generation with itext 5.5 for Arabic text

Question

I have java code that writes arabic characters with the help of itext 5.5 and xmlworker jars, but its writing left to right even after writer.setRunDirection(PdfWrit

Answer 1

As documented, this is not supposed to work:

writer.setRunDirection(PdfWriter.RUN_DIRECTION_RTL);

Arabic (and Hebrew) can only be rendered correctly in the context of ColumnText and PdfPCell. In other words: if you want to use Arabic from XML Worker, you need to create an ElementList and then add the elments to a ColumnText object as is done here.

You need to set the run direction at the level of the ColumnText object.