Tengwar Formal font homepage

Download zipped Tengwar Formal truetype font

After enjoying the "Lord of the rings" I got interested in its elvish script: – the Tengwar. Having seen some available tengwar fonts, I decided do make one, and it's here now. The font is made to resemble the formal bookhand, the elvish handwriting style – hence the name. I hope I did quite well, and I don't see any reason to enjoy the work myself only.

OFL Current version is 1.2c. In this release, I fixed some minor bugs, added files needed for Ω typesetting system, and adjusted some deeply-hidden metadata that contained obsolete license texts. Since version 1.2b, released in February 2006, Tengwar Formal fonts are distributed as freeware under terms of Open Font License by SIL international. Further details along with FAQ are available at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL.

This font's characters to keyboard mapping is compatible with Daniel Smith's, so there should be no problems using it. However, if you are a novice in tengwar fonts, please do read the tutorial! The mapping, strange as it may seem, is accepted as a de facto standard, and used in many tengwar transcription tools. I employed a minor change to the mapping, common in many newer fonts, that the "<" key gives not an ancient hwesta, but a variant of esse.

Unfortunately, Dan Smith's mapping was invented for Windows, long time ago, and hence exchange of Tengwar texts over the Internet, between users of different operating systems is always a pain. I can only advice to always use Unicode text encoding – that is supposed to be the default setting nowadays. Projects exist that aim to solve this and other issues (see section Unicode), but that's a matter of future.

Download:

There are several versions of Tengwar Formal font in different formats. My tool is capable to output mac fonts, but I have no hardware to test them. I would be grateful if anyone could check it. Anyway, the PC truetype should work under MacOS X.

Dan Smith's mapping was made under Windows, so users of older, non-Unicode versions of Mac OS were always in uncomfortable situation – many extended tehtar and special signs are unavailable or have different keystrokes than given in instructions. The problem is partly soluble by forging MacRoman versions of the fonts prepared so that every byte of the text is displayed like in PC. But the Unicode meaning is different! So these fonts, even if they actually work, are unsuitable for exchanging any data.

Maybe in future I will have some time to make the fonts in other formats, but it's more likely I won't... Still, if there isn't your favourite format in the list above, you can convert this font. If you do so, please let me publish it here, so that everyone could enjoy it.

Unicode:

Some time ago, a proposal has been made to include the tengwar to the Unicode, like any normal script. Does such a serious attitude to a work of a literary fiction have sense? Tengwar may turn out useful, as it's hard to display properly, because of its numerous diacritical marks &ndath; the tehtar – and how they are used. It could help to improve the smart font technology, needed by some real scripts, like indian or tibetan. This may result in tengwar fonts that are much easier to use than curent ones.

Before the proponents reach agreement upon many nasty details, and the Unicode consortium evaluates and accepts the proposal, time is needed. That doesn't prevent creation of experimental fonts, like those made by the Free Tengwar Font Project. They make possible to check the idea in practice and improve it:

Links:

Below are some useful tengwar related links. Digging there may answer lot of your questions:

If you want to contact me, please mail me.

Copyright © by Michal 'miszka' Nowakowski, Gdansk, Poland 2010. All rights reserved.

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