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Known Limitations

A short, honest record of behaviors customers may encounter that are not bugs in this framework but are worth knowing before they show up in a compliance archive or auditor walkthrough.

This page complements the framework documentation. Items here are not a deferred-defect backlog — those are tracked in the audit findings register. These are limitations of upstream platforms or browsers that we cannot fix in our own code.

Browser print-to-PDF and right-to-left (RTL) scripts

Affected feature: Assessment SPA → "Print to PDF" via the browser print dialog (Chromium, Edge, Safari, Firefox).

Symptom: When a results page contains Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi, or other RTL script (for example, in the Organization name field or in scoping notes), the PDF saved by the browser may contain those glyphs as Unicode Presentation Forms (the visual-order glyphs U+FB50–U+FEFF) rather than the logical-order Unicode code points the user typed. The PDF looks correct on screen but:

  • Text search inside the PDF returns no matches for the original word.
  • Screen readers (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver) read the presentation-form glyphs as their codepoint names rather than the intended word.
  • Compliance archive search (ProofPoint Compliance Gateway, Smarsh Enterprise Archive, Global Relay) cannot index the RTL content for retrieval during e-discovery.

Why this happens: Browser print pipelines flatten complex-script text into the visual-order glyph stream they send to the PDF writer. This is a known limitation of all major browsers' built-in print-to-PDF path; it is not specific to this framework.

Workaround for RTL compliance archives:

  1. Export results as JSON or Markdown from the SPA's Export panel (these formats preserve logical Unicode).
  2. Convert to PDF using a tool with proper complex-script support:
  3. LibreOffice — soffice --headless --convert-to pdf assessment.md produces a search-indexable PDF.
  4. Pandoc with XeLaTeX — pandoc assessment.md --pdf-engine=xelatex -V mainfont="Amiri" for high-quality RTL typography.
  5. Archive the PDF produced by step 2.

Markdown is not itself a WORM-archivable format in ProofPoint / Smarsh / Global Relay; the PDF produced from step 2 is.

Tracking: F-RUNTIME-PDF-ARABIC-RTL-CORRUPTION-01 (closed AS18c as a documented browser limitation, not a code defect).

Updated: May 2026 | Framework version: v1.6.2