Comment 5 for bug 500343

I think I can explain why this is happening, but I do not know where the problem is. The glyphs in question fall into the Unicode category"Mn" == "Mark, nonspacing". This attribute may or may not be encoded in the font somewhere. Most often I think, not. Even if it is, Freetype may not know how to extract it. As a result, either Inkscape, Pango, or Cairo is not doing the right thing when it attempts to display these glyphs. Presumably this also affects some or all of the 1000'ish other Mn unicode glyphs used in other languages.

The complete list of such glyphs may be found with this command:

  wget -q -O - http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.2.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt \
    | grep ';Mn;'

There is an Mn table already present in Inkscape in the src/dom/ucd.cpp file. Either something is not using it or not using it properly.

Since essentially every font I tried was broken for Hebrew in one way or the other in the end I had to load Ezra SIL SR (google
for it, freely available) onto my systems. (Google for it, free font.)