The PDF text model is quite nice, actually

As was discussed earlier, the way PDF handles fonts and glyphs is arcane and tedious. It takes a lot of boilerplate and hitting your shins against sharp stones to get working. However once you do and can turn to the higher level text functionality, things become a lot nicer. (Right-to-left, vertical and calligraphic scripts might be more difficult, but I don't know any of those.)

The PDF text drawing model provides a fairly wide selection of text operations.

If you, for example, want to produce a paragraph of justified text, first you need to calculate how the text should be split in lines and the additional word and character scaling parameters needed. Then the text can be rendered with the following pseudocode:

• Create a text object with the correct font and position.
• Set spacing values for the current line.
• Output the current line of text (add kerning manually if it is in a format Freetype does not handle)
• Repeat the above two steps until the paragraph is done
• Close the text object

This shifts the burden of having to compute each letter's exact location from you to the PDF renderer. If you need more precision than this, then you need to dig out Harfbuzz, and draw the glyphs one by one to precomputed coordinates.