Substack Arabic — RTL and Arabic tools

Fixes right-to-left Arabic on Substack: posts, editor, Notes and comments, plus a Quran verse inserter and Arabic search.

Writing in Arabic on Substack? This extension makes your text read the way it should: right to left, on every page. THE PROBLEM Substack sets one text-direction hint on the body of a post and none at all on your archive, your profile, your about page or any post title, so all of those render left to right. Even inside a single post, one decision is applied to every paragraph at once, so an English sign-off gets forced right to left, and an Arabic paragraph that happens to begin with a Latin word gets forced left to right. This extension fixes that, one paragraph at a time, everywhere on Substack. WHERE IT WORKS • Published posts, titles and subtitles • The editor, live as you type • Notes, comments, chat and direct messages • Archive listings, profile pages and about pages • Search boxes and title fields HOW DIRECTION IS DECIDED Per paragraph, from the actual proportion of Arabic to Latin characters in it, not from the first letter. An Arabic paragraph quoting an English sentence stays Arabic. An Arabic paragraph opening with a Latin brand name stays Arabic too. It also forces normal letter-spacing on Arabic. Arabic is cursive, and any tracking at all severs the joins between letters and turns words into a row of disconnected shapes. IT LEAVES YOUR PAGE DESIGN ALONE Substack's own typeface stays exactly as it is; this corrects direction and spacing and never substitutes a font. The interface stays as it is too. Other right-to-left extensions flip the whole page, which turns Substack's navigation, sidebar and dashboard inside out. This one never sets a direction on a layout container, only on the text itself. ARABIC WRITING TOOLKIT A button in the corner of the page opens four tools: • Quran — search the full Uthmani text of all 6,236 verses and insert one with its reference in a single click. Search ignores diacritics, so "الرحمن" finds "ٱلرَّحۡمَٰنِ", and you can type a reference directly, such as 2:255. The text is bundled in the extension and works offline. • Symbols — ﷺ ﷻ ﷽ ؑ ؒ ؓ and the ornate brackets ﴾ ﴿, one click each. • Direction — fixes a paragraph that begins with a Latin word or a digit. It writes an invisible direction mark into the post itself, so the fix survives into your published page and your emailed newsletter. • Date — today's date in Hijri, Gregorian, or both. If no draft is open, each of these copies to the clipboard instead, and the panel tells you which it will do before you click. SEARCH THAT UNDERSTANDS ARABIC Substack's own search does not normalise Arabic, so "اسلام" finds nothing for a post titled "إسلام". This does: it folds أ إ آ ا, ة and ه, ى and ي, and strips diacritics from both sides of the comparison. Open it on any publication by pressing Alt+Shift+A on your keyboard. A WORD COUNT THAT SUITS ARABIC Substack estimates reading time using an English words-per-minute rate. Arabic posts get a word count and an estimate meant for Arabic. PRIVACY No tracking, no analytics, no remote code, no third-party requests. Nothing is sent anywhere, and your settings live in your own browser. The extension asks for exactly one permission, storage, to remember those settings, and runs only on Substack. WHAT IT CANNOT DO No browser extension can change the email Substack sends to your subscribers; that is rendered on Substack's servers and read in the reader's inbox. The Direction tool alone reaches it, because it saves a real character into your post rather than restyling the page. Free, open source, and built for the Arabic Substack community.