You can test shaping of a unicode sequence against a font like this:
$ ./hb-unicode-encode 41 42 43 627 | ../../util/hb-shape font.ttf
assuming an in-tree build. The 41 42 43 627 here is a sequence of
Unicode codepoints: U+0041,0042,0043,0627. When you are happy with
the shape results, you can use the record-test.sh script to add
this to the test suite. record-test.sh requires pyftsubset to
be installed. You can get pyftsubset by installing
FontTools from https://github.com/behdad/fonttools.
To use record-test.sh, just put it right before the hb-shape invocation:
$ ./hb-unicode-encode 41 42 43 627 | ./record-test.sh ../../util/hb-shape font.ttf
what this does is:
hb-shape output of the original font versus the subset
font for the input sequence, hb-view for both fonts. fonts/sha1sum and name it after its hash,
and prints out the test case input, which you can then redirect to
an existing or new test file in tests, eg.: $ ./hb-unicode-encode 41 42 43 627 | ./record-test.sh ../../util/hb-shape font.ttf >> tests/test-name.test
If you created a new test file, add it to Makefile.am so it is run.
Check that make check does indeed run it, and that the test passes.
When everything looks good, git add the new font as well as new
test file if you created any. You can see what new files are there
by running git status tests fonts/sha1sum. And commit!
Note! Please only add tests using Open Source fonts, preferably under OFL or similar license.