How to Add Gujarati or Hindi Text to a PDF
Many people try to add a header, a stamp or a note in Gujarati or Hindi to a PDF and get a row of empty boxes (☐☐☐), question marks or letters in the wrong order. The text was correct when you typed it — something went wrong when it was put into the PDF.
This guide explains in simple terms why that happens and what a tool needs to do to write Indian-language text correctly, so you can choose tools that work and recognise ones that will not.
Why the boxes appear: the font has no such letters
A PDF does not store letters the way a text file does; it stores shapes from a font. Many PDF tools write text with the standard PDF fonts such as Helvetica or Times. Those fonts contain Latin letters and common symbols only — they simply have no Gujarati or Devanagari letters. When a tool asks the font for "ગ" or "न", there is nothing to draw, so you see a box or the tool fails with an error.
The fix is to embed a font that contains the letters you need, such as Noto Sans Gujarati or Noto Sans Devanagari, which are free, open-licensed fonts designed by Google for these scripts.
Why letters can appear in the wrong order: shaping
Having the right font is not enough. Gujarati and Devanagari are "complex scripts": vowel signs (matras) attach to consonants, some combine into conjuncts like ક્ષ or क्ष, and the short-i sign (િ / ि) is drawn before the consonant even though it is typed after it.
A process called text shaping turns the typed sequence of characters into the correct sequence of glyphs. Tools without shaping place each character one after another, which produces broken words such as a matra standing alone. Good tools run a shaping engine before drawing the text.
How FilesSwift handles Indian-language text
The FilesSwift PDF tools that add text — Add Text to PDF, PDF Watermark, Header & Footer and Bates Numbering, as well as TXT to PDF — detect when your text contains characters outside the standard PDF fonts. For Gujarati and Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit) they embed Noto Sans Gujarati or Noto Sans Devanagari and shape the text before drawing it, so matras and conjuncts appear correctly.
Only the characters you actually use are embedded, which keeps the PDF small. Plain English text continues to use the standard Helvetica font.
Add a Gujarati or Hindi header in three steps
For example, to put "શ્રી ગણેશાય નમઃ" at the top of every page:
- Open Header & Footer and upload your PDF.
- Type or paste the Gujarati or Hindi text into the header (and footer, if you want one).
- Press the button, download the PDF and zoom in to check the text.
Limits worth knowing
Emoji cannot be drawn with these fonts and are removed. Scripts other than Latin, Gujarati and Devanagari (for example Tamil or Bengali) are not supported by these tools yet.
Adding text with these tools creates fixed text on the page, like a stamp. To edit the text later, keep your original PDF and run the tool again with new text.
Text recognition (OCR) is a different problem: FilesSwift OCR currently recognises English text only, so it cannot yet make scanned Gujarati or Hindi documents searchable.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my Gujarati text show as boxes in other PDF tools?
The tool used a font without Gujarati letters. It needs to embed a Gujarati font, such as Noto Sans Gujarati, and shape the text.
Can I mix English and Gujarati in one line?
Yes. Each part of the line is drawn with a suitable font — English letters with the standard font and Gujarati or Hindi with Noto — so mixed text such as "Invoice ઇન્વૉઇસ ₹500" works.
Does the font make my PDF much bigger?
Only slightly — only the letters used in your text are embedded.
Can I add Tamil, Bengali or Urdu text?
Not yet. Currently Latin, Gujarati and Devanagari scripts are supported for adding text.