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. Use apt install g++-mingw-w64 on Debian.

  3. See how .ci/build-win32.sh uses meson or run that script anyway.

Now you can use hb-shape by (cd win32build/harfbuzz-win32 && wine 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 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)