Polyglossia Hebrew added horizontal space

Question

As you can see in the picture, using Polyglossia to insert a snippet of Hebrew is giving me an unwanted space before the Hebrew insertion. And as you can see, it's not happening with Arabic, so it's not an RTL problem. It seems Polyglossia and Hebrew specific.

Here is the code:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{fontspec}
    \setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
    \newfontfamily\hebrewfont[Language=Hebrew]{Linux Libertine O}
    \newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Scheherazade}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
    \setdefaultlanguage{english} 
    \setotherlanguage{hebrew}
    \setotherlanguage{arabic}   
\begin{document}

with Polyglossia (\texthebrew{זצ״ל})

no problem with Arabic (\textarabic{سلام‎})

or without Poly ({\addfontfeature{Language=Hebrew} {זצ״ל}})

\end{document}

I have already tried adding Script=Hebrew to the \hebrewfont definition, but the result is the same.

I have a big file full of Hebrew citations, and I have the impression this only started happening a few months or weeks ago — maybe a bug crept in? Any suggested fix will be highly appreciated, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Hoping it's useful, this solved it: after checking my installation and fiddling with fontspec options to no avail, I took a shot in the dark and downloaded from Github the most recent gloss-hebrew.ldf (I'm avoiding upgrading to TL2020 just yet)— and hey presto, problem solved.

I still don't know if there was just some unhappy conjunction of versions in my local folders, but the unwanted extra space has disappeared.