I would like to put an OpenType font in my assets folder and use Typeface.createFromAsset to render Unicode text in my Android appli
If you want to use Harfbuzz to do this, I have written a simple guide to implementing a text shaper using Harfbuzz: http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/duffers-guide-fontconfig-and-harfbuzz
That should get you from font selection to knowing which glyphs should be used and where to put them in the output.