Building an AI presentation generator that actually handles Arabic (RTL) right

A developer built DoocuAI, an AI tool that generates editable PowerPoint presentations from a topic or PDF, with a focus on proper right-to-left (RTL) support for Arabic. The tool addresses common issues like text direction, bullet points, and punctuation placement by implementing the Unicode Bidi algorithm and setting direction, alignment, list markers, and numeral shaping per paragraph. It is designed for university students in Iraq and the Arab world, aiming to reduce the time spent on mechanical formatting from hours to seconds.

Most "AI presentation maker" tools fall apart the moment you type Arabic. Text drifts to the wrong side, bullet points flip, punctuation jumps to the end of the line, and the exported file looks broken. That single problem is why I ended up building DoocuAI https://doocuai.com/ — an AI tool that turns a topic or a PDF into a full, editable PowerPoint deck, with right-to-left support treated as a first-class citizen instead of an afterthought. This post is about the parts that were actually hard, and what I learned shipping it for real students. I'm building for university students in Iraq and the wider Arab world. A typical "seminar" a graded classroom presentation eats 2–5 hours of a student's time — and almost none of that time is spent thinking. It goes into: The insight was simple: the thinking is the student's job, the mechanical formatting is not. So the tool should collapse the mechanical part to seconds and hand back an editable file — not a locked image, not a screenshot, an actual .pptx the student owns. .pptx output that opens in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, or LibreOffice.Nothing here is exotic. The interesting engineering was almost entirely in two places: making the LLM output a deck instead of an essay , and RTL . An LLM will happily write you five paragraphs about photosynthesis. That's the opposite of a good slide. A good slide is one idea, a few short lines, and a title. Two things helped the most: The academic structure being fixed and predictable turned out to be a feature, not a limitation — it's exactly what a grading committee expects to see. Here's the part I underestimated. Rendering Arabic on a web page is mostly solved dir="rtl" , unicode-bidi , a decent font . Rendering Arabic inside a generated presentation file is a different world: نظام ECTS بنسبة 40% . Naive RTL flips the whole run and the 40% lands in the wrong place. You need proper bidirectional handling the Unicode Bidi algorithm , not a blanket "reverse the string." محتوى has to keep its parentheses wrapping the right side, which "just reverse it" gets wrong every time.The fix wasn't one clever trick — it was refusing to treat RTL as a toggle. Direction, alignment, list markers, and numeral shaping each get set explicitly per paragraph, and templates are tested with real Arabic content before they ship. Unglamorous, but it's the difference between a file a student can hand in and one they have to redo by hand. .pptx instead of a locked export changed how people trusted the tool. Ownership matters.It's live and free to start at doocuai.com — type a topic or upload a PDF , pick a template, and you get an editable deck in seconds. If you work with RTL languages and want to tell me everything I still got wrong, I genuinely want to hear it — that feedback loop is how the Arabic handling got good in the first place. If you're building anything that generates documents from LLM output, I'm happy to go deeper on the structure-first prompting or the bidi handling in the comments.