I'm reworking the Gnome-Print interfaces to have nice font and text support. We are trying to get these unified as much as possible. To see how Microsoft does it, check out this overview and this reference doc . The Open Group has some information about editing in Thai and other complex scripts. The standard sucks, but the spec has some nice material in it.
ConScript contains many scripts invented in modern times.
It will be interesting to support at least some of these as well. Specific scripts Arabic The Art of Arabic Calligraphy by Mamoun Sakkal is a beautiful and informative introduction to Arabic script. CJKV Ken Lunde's book, CJKV Information Processing is the definitive resource for all texts Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. If only a book of this quality were available for the other scripts of the world, the task of creating a global text system would be much easier. Malayalam The Monotype WorldType has a description of Malayalam , including font sample and glyph repertoire.