Hebrew text rendering problem

["Christopher V. Kimball" <mail cvkimball com>]

I provide the public service site

http://www.tanach.us/Tanach.xml

of the Hebrew bible (Tanach) in Hebrew.  The site his based on Unicode
XSLT transformations and yields excellent rendering on all Windows
operating systems. 

Under (openSUSE 10.2) Linux the rendering with Firefox 2.0.0.2 is poor. 
When I enable pango via MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 the rendering improves a
great deal, but only for SHORT stretches of Hebrew text near about 30
Unicode characters.

The required font is SBL Hebrew at

http://www.tanach.us/Fonts/SBL_Hbrw.ttf

and a simple test is at

http://www.tanach.us/Fonts/FontTest.html

The text rendering in the first 4 cells from the top is excellent.  In
the 5-th cell, which has one additional word, the markings are offset to
the left by about half a consonant width.  All longer texts are
similarly rendered poorly.

Any help you could provide would benefit Linux based users of this site
worldwide.

Chris Kimball
transcriber tanach us