Comment 10 for bug 1282968

Also, will the OP please save that test phrase into an EMF file (for instance, from Powerpoint, select, save as picture, format EMF). Then if it looks OK in windows Preview, or when read back in by PowerPoint, read it into Inkscape and see what it does. The modifications for "Mark no advance" characters are in libTERE which EMF/WMF use to reassemble incoming text into editable text (as opposed to an assemblage of placed text snippets that cannot be edited as a whole). I'm wondering if the final SVG produced that way will have the same issue.

I think this note in Layout-TNG-Compute.cpp is probably near the source of the problem:

                    /* Notes as of 4/29/13. Pango_shape is not generating English language ligatures, but it is generating
                    them for Hebrew (and probably other similar languages). In the case observed 3 unicode characters (a base
                    and 2 Mark, nonspacings) are merged into two glyphs (the base + first Mn, the 2nd Mn). All of these map
                    from glyph to first character of the log_cluster range. This destroys the 1:1 correspondence between
                    characters and glyphs. A big chunk of the conditional code which immediately follows this call
                    is there to clean up the resulting mess.
                    */

If I had to bet, it would be that the rules to clean up the mess are different for Hebrew and whatever languages use the Telugu font.