Alternatively, there is the OpenSource font rendering
system "graphite" which was developed by SIL. There
are some applications on both Windows and Linux. It
uses smart fonts, where the language/script specific
information is included in the font, rather than in
the rendering system.
There have been some interesting experiments adding
Graphite rendering support to Pango. Also on the linux
platform, some alpha release of Graphite enabled
Mozilla and OpenOffice.