OK, how about this as a starting point: Q: How do I render a line of text in FreeType? A: FreeType is a very low-level rendering engine. All it knows how to do is render individual glyphs and return metrics for them.
Arranging glyphs into words and lines is best left to a more complete 2D graphics rendering library, like Cairo <https://www.cairographics.org/>. Cairo also does very basic translation of Unicode character codes to glyphs; for a more general solution, add HarfBuzz <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/>, which implements the full OpenType rules for glyph substitution and placement (Cairo still handles the actual text drawing). To deal with right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew) text layout, you will also need FriBidi <https://github.com/fribidi/fribidi>, which handles the details of the Unicode bidirectional layout algorithm. And finally, to cope with additional niceties like dealing with writing-system-specific rules for word breaks and line breaks, you might like to look at ICU <http://www.icu-project.org>, which includes a whole range of internationalization and localization facilities. [Is it worth mentioning Fontconfig <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/> as well, do you think? As a solution for font matching?]
