I can write Arabic fine (Did not try much) so there is still something I don't understand. The issue with Hebrew is seems to be related to the Arabic issue too. Droid sans hebrew and droid sans arabic are both being "merged" into droid sans family by fontconfig. Silica uses another font which is assigned explicitly via font.fontFamily I noticed that arabic shows fine if I install another font OR if I remove the fontconfig family merging XML snippet. I am yet to understand why this is happening. If someone can dig then please do too Seems I have missed that discussion. Who did you talk to? I am not surprised here because browser does its own rendering