[ft] i18n fonts

[Russell Shaw]

Hi,
I was thinking of making a multilingual text editor.

I don't get how glyphs are done outside of english.

I've read the Unicode Standard book.

When a paragraph of unicode characters is processed, the glyphs
are layed out according to the state contained in the unicode
character sequence.

Depending on this state, the same unicode characters can map to
multiple glyphs depending on context.

If multiple fonts exist for a language, then for all these font
files to work with an editor, then all these glyphs must be indexed
the same.

Where can i find the standard that specifies what glyphs are indexed
by what number? Or are these glyphs created on the fly by the unicode
paragraph layout processor?