How to copy an Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left website into Figma

Right-to-left pages break in ways left-to-right ones do not: punctuation on the wrong side, bullets on the wrong edge, English words in a font nobody picked. Here is how to copy one cleanly, and how to check any tool that says it can.

Updated November 2026 · by the Design Toolkit team · 4 min read

Why right-to-left pages break when they are copied

A right-to-left page has three things a left-to-right page does not: the text itself runs from the right, the layout is mirrored (the first menu item sits at the right edge), and almost every real page mixes scripts, with English brand names, numbers and brackets inside Arabic or Hebrew sentences. A copy tool that treats the page as left-to-right gets one or more of these wrong:

• Words or letters in the wrong order, or Arabic letters that no longer join, when a tool reverses the text itself or draws it character by character instead of keeping real text.
• Punctuation and numbers on the wrong side. A line that starts with an English word is read as left-to-right unless the layer says otherwise, so the full stop or the exclamation mark lands at the wrong end of an Arabic sentence.
• Text pushed to the left after the page had right-aligned it.
• Bullets, numbers and icons on the wrong edge of a list or a menu.
• English words in a font with no good English letters. A font chosen for Arabic or Hebrew may not cover Latin letters well, so the English words in the line fall back to a font nobody picked.

How to copy a right-to-left website into Figma

A six-point check for any right-to-left capture

Build or find a page with these cases, copy it with any tool, and look at the result next to the page:

1. A mixed line. An Arabic or Hebrew sentence with an English brand name, a number and a word in brackets. The reading order and the side of each bracket match the page.
2. A line that starts with English inside a right-to-left paragraph. The punctuation at the end stays on the correct side.
3. Alignment. Right-aligned paragraphs stay right-aligned, centered ones stay centered, and an English block on the same page stays on the left.
4. Menu and table order. The first menu item is at the right edge and the first table column is the right-most one.
5. Lists. Bullets and numbers are on the right edge of the text.
6. Fields and fonts. A field’s value or placeholder is right-aligned and is real text, and the English words in a line use an English font rather than a fallback.

What Design Toolkit does for each point

• Keeps real text. Each line is a text layer holding the characters in the order they were written. Figma does the shaping, so Arabic letters join as they should and you can retype the text.
• Writes the page’s direction. Every text layer carries the direction the page gave it: right-to-left on a right-to-left page, and an explicit left-to-right for an English block that contains Arabic or Hebrew words. Figma does not have to guess from the first letter.
• Follows the page’s alignment. Text that starts at the start edge of a right-to-left page is right-aligned in Figma; centered and left-aligned text stays as it was.
• Puts things where the browser put them. Boxes are placed from their real positions on screen, so a right-to-left menu, row or table comes out in the same order you see.
• Moves bullets and numbers to the right edge of a right-to-left list.
• Sets the font by script. Arabic and Hebrew words get a font that has those letters (the site’s own font when Figma has it, or Noto Sans Arabic or Noto Sans Hebrew when it does not), while the English words in the same line keep the site’s English font.
• Right-aligns field values and placeholders on a right-to-left page.

We checked this on a test page built from the six cases above and on the Arabic and Hebrew editions of Wikipedia. Figma lays the text out itself when you paste, so look at long paragraphs once to confirm the line breaks you want.

What to expect in Figma

• Custom fonts. If the site uses a licensed Arabic or Hebrew font that Figma does not have, Figma substitutes a similar font and widths change slightly. Swap in a font you have, such as Cairo, Tajawal, Almarai or Heebo, after pasting.
• Line breaks. Figma wraps the text with its own engine, so a long paragraph can break one word earlier or later than the page did.
• Layer order. The pasted auto layout lists items in the order they appear on screen from left to right; it is not a mirrored layout. The picture is the same, but the Layers panel reads left to right.

Common questions

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