For the development of HarfBuzz, the Microsoft shaping technology, Uniscribe, as a widely used and tested shaper is used as more-or-less OpenType reference implementation and that specially is important where OpenType specification is or wasn't that clear. For having access to Uniscribe on Linux/macOS these steps are recommended:

  1. Install Wine from your favorite package manager. On Fedora that's dnf install wine.

  2. And mingw-w64 compiler. With brew on macOS, you can have it like brew install mingw-w64. On Fedora, with dnf install mingw32-gcc-c++, or dnf install mingw64-gcc-c++ for the 64-bit Windows.

  3. Install cross-compiled dependency packages. Alternatively see [^1] below. On Fedora that would be dnf install mingw32-glib2 mingw32-cairo mingw32-freetype for 32-bit, or dnf install mingw64-glib2 mingw64-cairo mingw64-freetype for 64-bit.

  4. NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh && mkdir winbuild && cd winbuild

  5. Run ../mingw32.sh for 32-bit build, or ../mingw64.sh for 64-bit. This configures HarfBuzz for cross-compiling. It enables Uniscribe backend as well.

  6. make

Now you can use hb-shape using wine util/hb-shape.exe but if you like to shape with the Microsoft Uniscribe,

  1. Bring a 32bit version of usp10.dll for yourself from C:\Windows\SysWOW64\usp10.dll of your Windows installation (assuming you have a 64-bit installation, otherwise C:\Windows\System32\usp10.dll) that it is not a DirectWrite proxy (for more info). Rule of thumb, your usp10.dll should have a size more than 500kb, otherwise it is designed to work with DirectWrite which Wine can't work with its original one. You want a Uniscribe from Windows 7 or older.

    Put the DLL in the folder you are going to run the next command,

  2. WINEDLLOVERRIDES="usp10=n" wine util/hb-shape.exe fontname.ttf -u 0061,0062,0063 --shaper=uniscribe

(0061,0062,0063 means abc, use test/shaping/hb-unicode-decode to generate ones you need)

[^1] Download and put this in your ~/.local/i686-w64-mingw32. Then replace all the instances of /home/behdad/.local/i586-mingw32msvc and /home/behdad/.local/i686-w64-mingw32 with <$HOME>/.local/i686-w64-mingw32 on that folder. (<$HOME> replace it with /home/XXX or /Users/XXX on macOS) You shouldn't replace the instances of those inside binary files.