You may be interested by "Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for Indic
scripts" and "Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for Arabic scripts", both
available at <http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tt/tt.htm>.
To give a little bit of context, the OpenType architecture separates shaping in
two parts: the part that is script-dependent but font-independent (embodied on
Windows in the Uniscribe engine), and the part that is font-dependent (embodied in
GSUB/GPOS/GDEF/BASE tables in fonts). The GPOS/GSUB tables are best conceived as
"shaping subprograms stored in the font", and those subprograms are called by
Uniscribe. The documents above describe the API between the shaping engine and the
fonts.
I am not aware of similar material for AAT fonts, but that's another place to look
at.
Also, Latin cursive fonts tend to have a large number of glyphs: ligatures to
simulate the connectivity of the individual letters, and variants to simulate the
randomness of hand writing. This is not much different from Arabic fonts, not
surprisingly.
Eric.
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