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This directory contains the following files:
Metafont files for the Tengwar font. The normal design size is
of course(?) 10 points, although for ornamental purposes the
best size seems to be about 14 points. Thus,
\mode:=localmode; mag:=magstep2; input tengwar
is the best command line to use.
tengwar.mf The main file.
tiw.mf "input" file to include all the other pieces.
telcor.mf Stem definitions for the table letters.
luvar.mf Bow definitions for the table letters.
bars.mf Horizontal bars that are part of table letters.
tincotema.mf These four files are the four columns of the
parmatema.mf regular table letters (1--24).
calmatema.mf
quessetema.mf
additionals.mf Characters 25--36 from the bottom of the table.
fullvowels.mf The unique vowel characters from the Mode
of Beleriand.
accents.mf Diacritical vowels, dots below, bars, etc.
carriers.mf Things to put accents on.
punctuation.mf Punctuation marks.
numerals.mf JRRT's numerals as reported by Christopher
Tolkien (British Tolkien Society 1981).
ligtable.mf Some convenient ligatures.
Two samples using plain TeX accenting macros to generate pretty stuff:
quenya.tex Namarie
sindarin.tex A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Miscellaneous other stuff:
READ-ME This file.
Copyright My legal mark, in the spirit of TeX and GNU. Note
that this font is *not* public domain; I retain the
copyright. However, distribution is free as long
as you keep it free.
tengwarweird.mf An alternative to tengwar.mf, experimenting
with other pen parameters.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The letter values are, necessarily, somewhat idiosyncratic. By and large,
they are optimized for an English (Westron) mode using the "full" vowels
from the Mode of Beleriand. Obviously, using diacritical vowels will
require an input file that looks like line noise (see quenya.tex), or
will require sufficiently ingenious TeX macros and "active" characters
to perform the accenting where needed. This is left as an exercise
for the reader. In any case, it is recommended that you print a table
out using "testfont.tex" so you can see what is where.
The punctuation marks are based on those found in "Namarie". I am not
thrilled over the look of the question mark, but did not have an
assortment of examples for this character as I did for the others.
The numerals purport to be genuine creations of J.R.R. Tolkien,
unearthed by Christopher Tolkien in 1981. I worked from a photocopy
of an article attributed to the British Tolkien Society and copyright
by Christopher Tolkien (which copyright appears to have been
violated by whoever made the photocopy). I presume that duplicating
these numerals in digital form is governed by the same laws as duplicating
the other letters from Lord of the Rings (which is also copyright);
I hope this is all legal. To the best of my knowledge, this is the
first digitized Tengwar font that incorporated these numerals. I do not
especially care for the look of these numerals, but once again, there
was only the single page of specimens to work with, and this page
did not show numerals mixed with letters in the same calligraphic style.
If the numerals do not look sufficiently different from letters, the
practice of the Eldar was to accent each numeral with a dot above; for
a long string of numerals, a continuous bar above the string could be
used (experiment with \vrule or \hrule for this). Finally, numerals
were written in a decimal base, but with the low-order digits FIRST.
So the speed of light would be ``000681'' miles/second, if the Eldar had
reckoned in miles.
The S-hook, `halla' carrier, and Beleriandic "w-squiggle" (seen in
Sauron Defeated) were added September 1994 to work better with
Ivan Derzhanski's TengTeX macros.
I have experimented only a little bit with the "meta" possibilities for
this font, although I have made something of an attempt to parametrize
most of the glyphs. Try `tengwarweird' for a different look. You are
encouraged to experiment with the parameter settings and are
*DEFINITELY* encouraged to send me any interesting settings (and changes
that might be required to accomodate those settings).
Mike Urban
urban@netcom.com
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