Themes that claim RTL support usually mean the text flows right to left. Directional icons, sliders, type scale and checkout are where bilingual Shopify stores actually come apart.
Most themes advertise RTL support. What they usually mean is that text flows right to left. That is the easy half.
Icons that imply direction — back arrows, carousel controls, progress indicators — keep pointing the wrong way, because they were placed with fixed positioning rather than logical properties. Sliders scroll the wrong direction. Numbers, prices and dates sit awkwardly in mixed sentences. And any component built with left and right in its CSS instead of inline-start and inline-end has to be rewritten rather than flipped.
Arabic type has different vertical proportions to Latin. Dropping an Arabic face into a layout tuned for English gives you cramped line height and headings that lose their weight. It needs its own type scale, not a substitution.
There is also a performance cost nobody budgets for: bilingual stores load two typefaces. Without a deliberate font strategy, the Arabic side of the store is measurably slower than the English side.
Two diverging theme copies is the outcome to avoid. It works on launch day and drifts apart every month after.
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