I had this same problem with a document I started from an SVG file file downloaded from Wikipedia.
I started editing the document in Inkscape, by changing fill and stroke colours, trying out text wrapped in a path and text on a path, changed grid orientation settings and saved as SVG and continued editing in Affinity Designer.
If I open the original SVG file straight into Designer, there is no problem and I could not reproduce the issue by opening the original file again through Inkscape.
PS. I have not even used Publisher before fixing this.
PPS. RTL language support would be great!
As a developer, you basically just need to reverse the text when displaying and take into account some Unicode characters (0x200C, 0x200D etc...) that change the text direction inline, find a simple algorithm on python-bidi. I get that there are complexities as a developer, but could you please make this a priority?
Hebrew letters – Octahedron 20210915.afdesign