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:

You want to follow the 32bit instructions. The 64bit equivalents are included for reference.

  1. Install Wine.

    • Fedora: dnf install wine.

  2. Install mingw-w64 compiler.

    • Fedora, 32bit: dnf install mingw32-gcc-c++
    • Fedora, 64bit: dnf install mingw64-gcc-c++
    • Debian: apt install g++-mingw-w64
    • Mac: brew install mingw-w64

  3. If you have drank the meson koolaid, look at .ci/build-win32.sh to see how to invoke meson now, or just run that script. Otherwise, here's how to use the old trusty autotools instead:

    a) Install dependencies.

    • Fedora, 32bit: dnf install mingw32-glib2 mingw32-cairo mingw32-freetype
    • Fedora, 64bit: dnf install mingw64-glib2 mingw64-cairo mingw64-freetype

    b) Configure:

    • NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh && mkdir winbuild && cd winbuild
    • 32bit: ../mingw-configure.sh i686
    • 64bit: ../mingw-configure.sh x86_64

    c) Build as usual:

    • make

    d) Configure your wine to find system mingw libraries. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/Configure_wine

Now you can use hb-shape by (cd win32build/util && 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)

When you have built that, you can test HarfBuzz's native shaper against Uniscribe following these instructions:

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/3671