Tengwar Telcontar is an experimental Unicode font with support for the Tengwar script, which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. To use Tengwar Telcontar you will have to use either Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Linux. Earlier versions of Windows, e.g. Windows 98 can not be used, since they lack support for Unicode. MacOs is unfortunately not supported either, since Tengwar Telcontar relies on software (Graphite) that at the moment is not available on the Mac platform.
The following illustration gives an example of what the regular style of the font looks like. A PDF-file with further examples of the font, both in regular and bold style, in both the Latin script and Tengwar, is available for download.
Discussion on how to encode Tengwar in Unicode has gone on since at least 1993, when it was discussed on the TolkLang mailing list. In 1997, a first official proposal to encode Tengwar in Unicode was submitted by Michael Everson. Later, discussion papers for a more refined encoding were published at the CSUR. These papers were discussed on the Elfscript mailing list, but the discussion faded away after a while, still leaving some open questions and room for improvement. Since then, not much has happened, a fact I intend to change by providing this font.
Because of the later encoding proposals at CSUR, I have decided to use one of them as the basis for the encoding of Tengwar Telcontar. Therefore, it is not compatible with James Kass’s font Code2000, which uses the encoding of the original official proposal. This was a conscious decision of mine: there is no reason to promote the original encoding proposal when more worked out proposals exist.
Please note that that I do not intend to establish a new de facto standard with Tengwar Telcontar in its current form. On the contrary, I hope that the possibilities of working with a usable font will spur the discussion on the best way to encode Tengwar in Unicode, and that, with the help and suggestions from fellow Tolkiendili, my font will evolve in a gradually improving manner. As such, Tengwar Telcontar should be seen rather as an interactive discussion paper, which may provide inspiration for an official encoding standard endorsed by the Unicode consortium.
In other words, Tengwar Telcontar is a work in progress (the Latin script is for example far from covered yet). Note specifically that upcoming versions very well might not be backward compatible! So, by all means, do play away with Tengwar Telcontar, but keep in mind that it is probably unwise to, e.g., set out to make a canonical transcription of all attested tengwar specimina in it, with the intention that it should be working with the next version too. It may well be that it turns out as complete garble instead.
Intro • Basics • Encoding • Rendering • Tutorial • Downloads • Blog
Copyright © 2005–2009 Johan Winge.