Yeah, I’m curious if that problem is baked into the SVG, or if the renderer has a “don’t screw up Arabic” option that’s disabled by default. You’d think nobody would design software that way, but Photoshop has that option, and it really is turned off by default!

They are just Unicode strings in the vector tiles (which are their own format, nothing to do with SVG). It's this particular demo that is missing basic Arabic support.

  string_value: "شارع المدينة القديمة"

Someone's already made an issue: https://github.com/pnorman/osmf-shortbread-todo/issues/9

Found via what seems to be the announcement of this demo/preview service: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/vector-tiles-on-osmf-h...