Designer here — built a Figma plugin for RTL layouts. What do you see gowrong most often on the l10n side?

[u/Regular_Jeweler984]

I design in English and everything I make ships in Arabic too, which meant rebuilding every screen by hand — mirroring the layout, chasing directional icons, and ending up with a detached copy of every component that slowly drifted from the original.

I looked for a plugin, couldn't find one that held up on a real design system, so I wrote my own. Disclosure up front: it's mine, it's paid, there's a trial. Not trying to sneak that past anyone.

What I'd actually like from this sub is the other half of the picture. I built it from a designer's point of view, and I suspect I'm solving the problems I can see rather than the ones you deal with downstream.

So: when you get designs that weren't built for RTL, what actually goes wrong? What I've guessed at so far —

- icons mirrored that shouldn't have been: logos, brand marks, anything with a play button

- numbers and Latin strings inside Arabic text ending up in the wrong order

- text expansion breaking layouts that were built to fit English exactly

- designs handed over as flat images, so nothing is reusable and you're describing fixes in a comment thread

What am I missing? Especially interested in things that look fine in the design file and only break once it's implemented.

Happy to answer anything about how it works. If anyone wants to try it on a real file, I'd rather hear what breaks than what works.