Writing with Elvish Fonts

dj_whitebread writes "Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script? Now's your chance to have your Elvish text look just like Tolkien's. This page gives you all the instructions. The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!"

Comments

elvish and Plan 9

[F2F]

Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked. After all, those are the people who brought you UTF-8!

Screenshot here!

The complete ring poem

[mike_stay]

The complete ring poem wasn't inscribed on the ring, only two lines from the middle of it. Tolkein only gives the translation of those two lines, but an anonymous linguist with the pen-name "Elerrina" has reconstructed the complete poem with analysis. Here it is sans analysis:

Gakh Nazgi Ilid/Albai/Golug - durub-uuri lata-nuut.
Udu takob-ishiz gund-ob Gazat-shakh-uuri. Krith Shara-uuri matuurz matat duumpuga.
Ash tug Shakhbuurz-uur Uliima-tab-ishi za, Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.
Ash nazg durbatuluuk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluuk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,
Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.

See the TolkLang mailinglist archive for the original source. I've got it formatted using the fonts described in the article here (MS Word docfile, sorry!).

See also this bracelet I engraved with the complete poem with a dremel. The copper under the gold plating gives an impression of fire. On the gift card I wrote "This doesn't work, which is probably a good thing."

This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid stuff like this is one reason Unicode is such a mess: "Unicode can now support charsets such as Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B!"

Yeah, but at what cost? Am I the only one unhappy with the current Unicode? The problem is that there's just not one Unicode -- there's THREE (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32). Reading a simple character in UTF-8 now is almost like reading a miniature file with an ambiguous format, prone to aliasing and security problems if normalization (just choose one of FOUR valid kinds) and mapping to glyphs is implemented incorrectly. For example, a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think. What's a good buffer size for a UTF-8 encoded filename? That's why buffer overruns are so common these days. Why are we going to all this trouble just to support Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B, which are of interest to so few people who aren't half serious anyways?

This is where the word "DISCIPLINE" comes to mind. The Unicode organization does not have the DISCIPLINE to combat feature creep. UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS. Just stop it already.

And the Unicode standard is now at Version 4.0. When will they freeze it? 10 years from now, is there going to be a Unicode Version 10? I can't imagine the mess the "standard" is going to be.

This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea. I'm not opposed to attempts at Internationalization, and again, UTF-16 was good enough.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations

When? We're still largely English, but we have maybe a couple hundred non-English books, for which we use an appropriate codepages. There's an unfortunate number of stuff in unlabeled DOS codepages in the archives, but modern stuff is labeled, and usually posted in ISO-8859-x (for an apropriate value of x). UTF-8 is usually only used for old Icelandic and stuff with odd accents (a lot of books dealing with India and the Middle East use macrons over vowels, for example.) It's mainly the choice of our producers, since that's what they find easy to work with.

Lots of extra Tolkien language info

[JorenDahn]

A fantastic site for this stuff, and very highly thought of in the Tolkien language community (yes, it exists, stop laughing. :P Language is a profession taken more seriously in Europe you know) is Ardalambion. Here the author has compiled a ton of info on all of Tolkien's many languages (even ones that are not related to the world of Middle-earth), and even a course to learning the Elvish language Quenya! Very cool stuff. :) Also, I have a handy quick-and-dirty reference guide to Tolkien at my site here: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm.

Enjoy, all ye pursuers of Elvish. :)

Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

School lectures are boring. To keep myself awake, I tried writing with my left hand, writing upside down, upside down and backwards, or the same with my left hand. I memorized pi to 210 digits over a few days' lectures.

Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar. I liked the way the letters worked so I learned it and I was hooked.

So I bought a calligraphy pen and took it to all my classes. My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.) I found it to be a creative/artistic outlet in all my dry technical courses.

I'm not a Tolkein geek (never read the books), but now the girl is 2000 miles away, and when people find out I write in elvish, some say "you must have a lot of time on your hands" and think I'm some sort of uber dork (maybe they're reading this). C'est la vie I guess.

It was 24 years ago today (or thereabouts)

[aebrain]

...that I first programmed an Elvish character set into my trusty Exidy Sorcerer. From Wikipedia:

Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512 x 240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320 x 200.
...
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to not really to have graphics at all. Instead they allowed the user to re-define the character set (the shapes of the letters on screen) and used these in lieu of pixel-addressable graphics.

The big problem was the vowels - which are implemented as accents/modifiers to the basic consonant glyphs. But it was trivial to write a small program that took latin characters in, and produced elvish output on the screen. Even doublets like zh resulted in a single glyph IIRC.
More difficult was Tsolyani, which is written right-to-left and has a different character set for leading and trailing letters. Still, an 8-pin graphics printer gave good results with both.

A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port

First done at room 642, International House, Sydney University in 1978, as far as I'm aware. But I'm sure others did the same thing at about the same time. Ah, the days when I could double my memory from 16K to 32K for only a few hundred bucks...and debug programs by having a radio nearby and listening to the RFI from various parts of the motherboard. The same year, the University of Wollongong narrowly beat us in porting UNIX. Others in the US were working on that too.
And now I'm an old fart, working with Ada-95 on Satellite Avionics, and X/T UML on agile development... both of which are pretty neat, and cutting edge. (I'll revise that remark about Ada being "cutting edge" when Java catches up and gets Generics and the other stuff invented back in 1983.) It proves that you can still be a Geek at 45.

As fonts, they're only so so

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Speaking as a former full time and now only occasional type designer, these elvish fonts are mediocre.

They are cleary swiped from other fonts, but I will comment on the more "standard" of the lot, TengwarQuenya.

First off, it's taken from Times New Roman, which is not a big deal to me. It's boring, but not bad - I'd have prefered something with a little more tang, like Cloister or even Berling, but Oh Well. We're talking LOTR geeks, not Hermann Zapf. Speaking of Zapf, Gudrun's font, Diotima, would be nice for the Elvish treatment...

Secondly, the curves in the letters that are not derived from Times are very uneven, and ungraceful. Because of this, there are a pleathora of points describing what is essentially a simple clean curve.

A good example of this would be the char in l.c. "i" and the l.c. "k".. they're wavy snaky things with about 5x as many points as they need, and that's even accounting for the quadratic curve description differences in TrueType.

The letter spacing is mediocre. There are a few combos that could use some kerning, but the real problem lies in how letters that have identical forms are given different side bearings. Example: in English the letters (in helvetica / arial) l, h, and b sould have extremely similar if not largely identical left sidebearing values. In Adobe Helvetica, the left sidebearings for k, b, h, and l are: 67, 58, 65, and 67.

For letters q, w, y, and t in Tengwar Times, which all have very similar left side shapes, and similar counter spaces, have values of : 12, 25, 12 and 0. Which is crap.

So, overall, I give these fonts a C+.

They'll do the trick for the unclued, but they're not art.

Also, they are not available in Mac format, and for a graphics oriented font, that's a really sad thing to overlook. But it was devised by Geeks for other Geeks using MS Word, so, we're talking dupes of the conspiracy here.

RS

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dvdeug]

Regarding fonts not having copy rights, can you cite references for this?

Copyright FAQ, question 3.3