Typophile

Tengwar font development

pablohoney77

okay, so if you know what this subject means, you must know that i'm a LOTR geek (check the current icon); i found some other information on tengwar fonts on the string about mixing scripts and thought it deserved its very own string. so i had a couple questions... first of all has the unicode been standardized for the script? secondly, does that really matter now with open type? i mean couldn't a person make a tengwar font these days that would just replace the appropriate ligature for the vowel placing? (or is ligature substitution what one would want to use for tengwar?) i've been interested in making my own tengwar font as the ones that are out there don't seem to be as interesting and/or artistic as the could be. (or can one of you point me towards some finer fonts?) i'm thinking that New Line had to have done SOMETHING for the LOTR series and some of their stuff (like the lettering on the ONE RING is absolutely gorgeous!) dunno if they actually made a font tho, would be great if they had. anyhow i'm just surprised that the movies hadn't sparked more interest in here on this topic! let's get some good dialog flowing... i'd love to be enlightened on this one!

eomine

There's something here.

pablohoney77

thanks eduardo, i had read that string before posting my own. but was just wondering if there were any updates since september and seeing if anyone had any insight on how best to work out the logistics of a tengwar font. that's why i started this string.

John Hudson

Here is Michael Everson's Proposal to encode Tengwar in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2 (ISO/EC 10646 is equivalent to Unicode). And here is are his most recent revisions and discussion papers.

pablohoney77

thanks john for the information on unicode.. anyone out there tried to put together an open type version of this script? i know there are some people who have developed their own applications and fonts for this script (http://www.acondia.com/tengwar_fonts/index.html), but wouldn't it be easier to just make a tengwar font that operated using opentype encoding?

Hrant H Papazian

> anyone out there tried to put together an open type version of this script?

Yeah, Sauron was working on it as part of some bigger scheme, but the whole project got cancelled unexpecedly. I forget why exactly, but something or other to do with lava.

hhp

pablohoney77

thanks for the laff, hrant! sauron probably woulda made the opentype version if he had ever gotten his ring back. dunno if he had the capabilities to do it without it tho.

anonymous

What, exactly are you looking for in a Tengwar font? I've got in my own collection most of the Windows freeware Tengwar fonts out there, (and a couple of them I made myself, actually). Most of them follow Dan Smith's "standardized" character mapping, but there are also a few that are mapped phonetically. I have also found a number of Roman-readable fonts based on Tengwar letter forms. E-mail me if you have questions.

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