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.

  2. And mingw-w64 compiler. With brew on macOS, you can have it like brew install mingw-w64

  3. Download and put this on your ~/.local/i686-w64-mingw32.

  4. 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)

    Probably you shouldn't replace the ones are inside binaries.

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

  6. ../mingw32.sh --with-uniscribe && cd ..

  7. make -Cwinbuild

Now you can use hb-shape using wine winbuild/util/hb-shape.exe but if you like to to use the original 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.

    Put the dll on the folder you are going to run the next command,

  2. WINEDLLOVERRIDES="usp10=n" wine winbuild/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)