You might like to know that STSF (http://stsf.sourceforge.net/about.html) has been unmaintained for a couple of years, but is being resurrected with a recent patch or two. It does server-side rendering and unicode.
What about the stuff on http://www.m17n.org? This looks promising too.
The other way is to use freetype2 and Xrender. This will also be quite compact in size, but you'll have to add all the glyph formatting scripts for different languages if required.
I don't understand exactly what you mean. Please give an example.
I mean that when you enter characters from the keyboard, they are not one-to-one with the glyph to print, so you need to build grapheme clusters and all that and map them to glyphs according to the language, which you probably know (it's in the big Unicode Standard book).
-- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/