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Lord of the Rings Media Movies It's funny. Laugh.

Writing with Elvish Fonts 409

Posted by michael from the spanish-is-easier-and-more-useful dept.
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!"
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Writing with Elvish Fonts More

Writing with Elvish Fonts

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  • Elvish Meetups (Score:5, Informative)

    by bluethundr ( 562578 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:08AM (#6612555) Homepage Journal
    If you want to understand the invented languages of Tolkien, a good place to start is with a meetup group. [meetup.com]

    Some people take their Elvishness pretty sillyessny [geocities.com]...erm meant to say seriously... :)

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:09AM (#6612559)
    In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here [martin-studio.com] is a mirror.

    --
    Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy [martin-studio.com]

  • Resumes (Score:5, Funny)

    by deanj ( 519759 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:11AM (#6612568)
    Man, just the thing to make the old resume stand out in the crowd.

  • Hell Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mschoolbus ( 627182 ) <{travisriley} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:12AM (#6612576)
    Now I know what to put all over my rice burner to make it faster!!!

  • Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:15AM (#6612596) Homepage Journal
    Where can I get an Elvish keyboard?

    QWERTY,
    DVORAK,
    TENGWAR?
  • This stuff looks like it's in a foreign language or something.

  • Seen this. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Fizzl ( 209397 )
    I think this was the very same site I used as a reference when desinging engravings to my and my ex-girlfriends rings. I think this was at the time of making of LOTR's first book into a movie.
    I recall I also used some stand-alone app to get the nifty fonts after I learned exactly what letters I wanted.

  • Conscript/Unicode (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:17AM (#6612612)
    I appreciate the mapping by Daniel and all, but if you are really interested in Cirth and Tengwar, push for the Unicode inclusion. http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.htm l and http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1641/n1641. htm

    For a font that does PUA and Plane 15 implementation of this standard use code 2001 from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm

    Logban (A logical language for human speech), Quenya, Sindarian, English, etc. can all be written in Tengwar. I believe there are people using it for just about every language, including esperanto.

    So, while the keymap is nice, use the Unicode stuff and help push it through to final inclusion.

  • woohoo (Score:5, Funny)

    by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:22AM (#6612636) Journal
    Being able to write love poems using the Elvish script will really give me the edge in attracting a female companion!

    Thanks slashdot :)

    • Re:woohoo (Score:5, Funny)

      by MacGod ( 320762 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:23AM (#6612948)
      Well, only if your hitting on Elvish women!

      Otherwise you might as well just wear an "I'm a big geek" T-shirt. Like, say, this one. [thinkgeek.com]

    • Re:woohoo (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know you're joking. But I've got love letters written to me using elvish script by my college girlfriend, 14 years ago... it's amazing how fast you can pick up a new alphabet, given sufficient motivation.

      And you can write very rude things indeed to each other in a script that nobody will be able to casually read. Which is nice...

      Happy days... :-)

  • More importantly (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nihilist_CE ( 683399 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:23AM (#6612644)
    /. readers now know that michael has a typographer inside him! Get it out, michael!

  • Hardly a new idea (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:27AM (#6612665)
    There have been (several) Tengwar variants for TeX for at least 10-20 years....

    I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one
    • I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one

      No, they've been around on Macs and PCs at least as long. (One minute of Google finds some dated 1991.) Must be a slow day at Slashdot.

  • The instructions assume a Windows PC.

  • Writing with is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:30AM (#6612682) Homepage
    Is all well and good, but Don't Come Crying To Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish [theonion.com].

  • The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Funny)

    by groove10 ( 266295 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:32AM (#6612691) Homepage
    The ultimate geek matchup: Tengwar vs. Aurebesh [starwarsdotcom.com]!

    Which font will earn the right to go up against Klingon for the hearts (and webpages) of geeks worldwide?

    On a personal note, I'll always be an Aurebesh man myself.

    • Re:The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Informative)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:03AM (#6612860)
      Tengwar vs. Aurebesh!

      No contest. Tolkien was a language expert. Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember). From a brief look Aurebesh looks like just a substitution code for English (or am I wrong?). There's a lot more to a language than an alphabet. Also, the Elvish scripts are beautiful; and if you like more angular characters, look at his Dwarvish runes.

      • Re:The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Informative)

        by JorenDahn ( 670270 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:37AM (#6612986) Homepage
        >Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember).

        Actually it wasn't based on Finnish at all, but rather inspired by it. It has it's own structure, just like any other language. Quenya was (in some ways) meant to capture the beauty that Tolkien saw in the Finnish language. In the early versions of Quenya he did use some loanwords from Finnish, but those were of course all replaced. Also there are many fundamental differences besides simple words (since it is, of course, it's own language). The modern (or "completed" if you prefer, although he never actually finished them) version have no connections with any real languages. If you get to really know the internal linguistic history of Tolkien's languages you can see how their world was meant to connect to ours (hint: in the LotR movies the Rohirrim speak a real language).

        For some great info on the relationship between the Elvish languages and real world languages (primarily Finnish), check out this great article: http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm [www.sci.fi]

        Yes, I'm a big fat nerd. I even have my own page on Tolkien: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm [deciv.com]

  • dear god please let this not be real (Score:5, Funny)

    by Letter ( 634816 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:33AM (#6612694)
    dear god please let this not be real,

    On June 16, 2001 Elenhil Laiquendo (Boris Shapiro) and Elgaladna Findilauriel (Olga Kukhtenkova) got married [elvish.org] in a catholic church in Russia. Boris is an amateur linguist and a beginner lambengolmo. He is fond of Tolkien and his languages and he specializes (to a certain extent) in Quenya and in Middle-earth calendars; he has complex ideas about Tolkien's world and Christianity and the Elder Days of our oikoumene; his beloved, Olga is an artist, a dramatic actress, a theatre costumier, she loves drawing fairies and elves and illustrating Tolkien, she also specializes in the history of arts and culture and loves mythology and collects cosmogonical mythos. They both are elves: his name is Elenhil Laiquendo and her one is Elgaladna Findilauriel.

    so elves do get laid,
    letter

  • Two words:

    Lah-hoo. Zah-hers.

  • elvish and Plan 9 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by F2F ( 11474 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:41AM (#6612740)
    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 [cam.ac.uk]!

    Screenshot here [ucalgary.ca]!

    • Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked.

      What a great pickup line. I'd say that beats "You must be tired, because you've been running through my mind all night." Mind if I borrow it this weekend?

  • The complete ring poem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mike_stay ( 631250 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:44AM (#6612753) Homepage
    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 [ed.ac.uk] for the original source. I've got it formatted using the fonts described in the article here [xaim.com] (MS Word docfile, sorry!).

    See also this bracelet [xaim.com] 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 isn't anything new. There have been tengwar and sindarin TTF fonts available for many years, at least 8 or 9 years.

    The reason I know is that I did a project in school that was related to precisely tengwar and sindarin, and I managed to get hold of a couple of TTFs which made my life easier (but I won't say easy - querty + elvish = not good). Should still have the TTFs on a floppy somewhere.

    Got good marks for the project too. I'm guessing it might've been related to the fact that the teacher couldn't

  • Unicode (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LauraW ( 662560 )
    There's even a proposal [dkuug.dk] to add Tengwar to Unicode [unicode.org]. I don't think it's very high on the priority list, though.

    Er, sorry if I just slashdotted you guys.

  • For all you ./'rs out there who were thinking that this font would make for a romantic and heartfelt letter to finally admit your love for that girl you've been admiring from afar:

    Don't.

    Believe me, your ego will thank me later.

  • Dirty Language (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kenshin ( 43036 )
    Yes, but can someone translate and write "Kiss My Ass" in Elvish?

    I'd like to see that...

  • Answer questions. (Score:5, Funny)

    by euxneks ( 516538 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:01AM (#6612848)
    Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script?

    No.

  • This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:03AM (#6612861)
    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.

    • What's a good buffer size for a UTF-8 encoded filename? That's why buffer overruns are so common these days.

      But why would you use a fixed-length buffer?? Use a unicode string class for crying out loud.

    • Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dmeranda ( 120061 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:47AM (#6613018) Homepage

      "Feature creep?" You mean like fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages like Elvish? It's Unicode that's trying to bring some uniformity and saneness to this human condition of Babel.

      Your problem is that you're confusing the Universal Character Set (UCS), which is the core of Unicode, with a character encoding, such as UTF-xx and so forth. UTF-16 is NOT Unicode! When will that myth ever die? Perhaps you should go visit the Unicode Consortium [unicode.org] home page and read through some of their FAQs.

      And there's way more than just three encodings, but there's only one Unicode (actually there's ISO If these Elvish characters are more than just a curious fad then what's wrong with assigning them Unicode code points? The only problem would be doing so prematurely before all the characters have been reasonably deteremined and stable. Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text. Granted though, the Unicode Consortium is primarily concerned with real human languages rather than inventions of fiction.

      As far as encodings, keep in mind that Unicode is essentially a 20-bit character set allowing slightly more than one million separate characters to be defined (I say 20-bits loosely since the UCS codepoints really don't map to bits at all). So even your beloved UTF-16 (or the older UCS-2) is unnecessarily messy; having to use the low and high surrogate pairs to properly encode the entire UCS repertoire. Not to mention things like byte order issues and so forth.

      This is why I actually love UTF-8, it is actually very simple and easy to work with. I think a lot of people get scared-off because it is variable-width, but for anybody who has actually coded using it, it is a very nice and easy to use encoding. Of course people primarily communicating in non-Latin languages may have other opinions. That's fine too.

      As far as Project Gutenberg selecting US-ASCII, well, it sure looks identical to UTF-8 to me! In fact ASCII text is identical to UTF-8 text (but not the other way around). Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations and I'd be very surprised if UTF-8 is not the adopted character encoding. In fact they could just make the policy change right now, and they'd have to retype exactly zero documents in their collection.

      • Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dvdeug ( 5033 ) <dvdeug&email,ro> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:40AM (#6613164)
        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.

    • Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dvdeug ( 5033 ) <dvdeug&email,ro> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:27AM (#6613132)
      Stupid stuff like this is one reason Unicode is such a mess:

      Nonsense. Most of the messy stuff in Unicode comes from real life complexity in writing systems and compatibility with preexisting codepages. If you want to, you can ignore Linear-B and still be entirely standards compliant.

      a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think.

      Blame the Romans; they're the ones who had to make up their own writing system instead of just using Greek. ISO-8859-5 (Russian) and -7 (Greek) both have this problem, as do all modern Greek and Russian codepages.

      That's [UTF-8] why buffer overruns are so common these days.

      Right; that explains why the original Unix systems, which predate Unicode, were rife with buffer overflows, and modern system code (e.g. coreutils), which handle Unicode, are nearly overflow free.

      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?

      Who said this had anything to do with Tengwar and Linear B? Tengwar isn't in Unicode, and every premodern script put together isn't more then 1000 characters. Han characters is responsible for having multiple planes, and preexistening standards and preexisting standards are responsible for normalization and most duplicate characters.

      UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS.

      But it wasn't good enough for Unix. HUMAN BEINGS don't using Unicode much - they prefer writting the characters to using numbers.

      When will they freeze it?

      Why would they? So far as humans are creating more characters, there will be a need to add new characters to Unicode. They don't freeze other standards - Fortran is now Fortran 2000.

      This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea.

      This has nothing to do with PG's decision to use ASCII. PG is doing more and more in Unicode, because that's the only way to do things.

  • Will this help my Nethack ascension? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmeranda ( 120061 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:17AM (#6612923) Homepage
    My blessed magic marker keeps drying out when I try to write those complex spellbooks that I can never seem to read. Not to mention all those monsters that keep ignoring my hastily engraved Elbereth; here I've been using the wrong font all along. Stupid tourist!
  • On the page, the font author discusses how to type characters, since they are mapped differently than latin. In order to produce the characters that most closely represent the sounds from the latin characters, he says:

    Using a transcriber such as Mans Bjorkman's TengScribe. You only need to type in the desired text in Latin letters (the ones you are currently reading), choose a mode, and tell the transcriber to produce the corresponding Tengwar text.

    Anyone out there with more perl knowledge than I want

  • Beautiful...

    I shall begin the translation now.

    Within a week I will be the proud possessor of the finest nerd togs in existence!

    Behold: My elvish cloak with intricate Tengwar DeCSS print
  • The day that my XT replaced
    my D&D dice holding case
    social skills I neglected
    elvish lore I dissected
    and a celibate life I embraced.

    -- www.bbspot.com
  • Now I've just got to get a hold of some gold and equipment and I can make my own precious...me likes my precious...mmmm

  • Lots of extra Tolkien language info (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JorenDahn ( 670270 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:51AM (#6613034) Homepage
    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 [ardalambion.com]. 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 [www.uib.no]! 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 [deciv.com].

    Enjoy, all ye pursuers of Elvish. :)

  • Learn Elvish! (Score:2, Informative)

    by ashot ( 599110 )
    UT [utexas.edu] has a class [utexas.edu] dedicated to the study of Tolkien's languages.
  • The page has a link to some Word macros that give you toolbars for working with the fonts.
    Anyone converted them to OpenOffice's Java-Basic-UNO 'language'?
    Yes I'm being sarcastic.

  • From the site. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Cydonian ( 603441 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:16AM (#6613100) Homepage Journal
    We will not discuss the Cirth, the angular letters seen in the inscription on Balin's tomb. The Cirth are also called runes, while Tengwar is translated as "letters".

    I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes [omniglot.com], that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?

    If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 [wikipedia.org] (here [unicode.org] as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).

    (/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)

    • I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?

      The runes used on the map in "The Hobbit" did use the real runic alphabet (or a close variant thereof). The Cirth described in the appendices of LOTR was comletely different, however. So the official answer is probably "no".
    • can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?

      Runes is a more general term - not all runes are associated with the northern Germanic Runic alphabet. (Hungrarian runic, for example). No, Tolkein's runes are not the same as the Germanic Runes. /.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, aliv
      • Besides, the transcriber has got it all wrong.

        Consider this extract [passagen.se] I got after a bit of focussed googling. Compare that with the Roman transliteration given at the bottom of a fan page [passagen.se]. This, apparently, is an absolutely correct piece of transliteration; notice how the author points with glee [forodrim.org] that JRR Tolkein himself got it wrong in his transliteration. In particular, Tolkein apparently forgot that the script is phonetic in nature, and that the long 'e' in 'even' and 'seen' needs an additional accent on t

  • Writing in elvish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mawen ( 317927 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:25AM (#6613126) Journal
    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) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aebrain ( 184502 ) <aebrain@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:31AM (#6613139) Homepage Journal
    ...that I first programmed an Elvish character set into my trusty Exidy Sorcerer [wikipedia.org]. 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 [geocities.com], 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 [usyd.edu.au], 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 [terrigal.net.au]. Others in the US were working on that too [mids.org].
    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.

  • LaTeX has had a Tengwar font for many moons (Score:5, Informative)

    by topologist ( 644470 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:32AM (#6613145)
    Interesting. I'd also like to note that LaTeX, the Knuth/Lamport typesetting system available on a great many platforms (including Windows), has had an elvish font for several years. I am no elvish scholar of course, so I can't comment on the appeal of the LaTeX approach to the elvish cognoscenti :-)
    \documentclass{article}

    \begin{document}

    \newfont{\elvish}{tengwar}

    The One Ring: {\elvish

    Three rings for the elven kings under the sky Nine for mortal men doomed to die Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone One for the dark lord on his dark throne In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.}

    \end{document}

  • As fonts, they're only so so (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @02:50AM (#6613202) Journal
    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

  • There's an indirect attribution, but no acknowledgement of rights or suggestion of a fair use defence. This is a copyright violation until shown otherwise. Whether it's morally wrong or not is quite another matter, but remember, under the current Disney regime, it's death plus ninety years. Your grandkids might be able to use Tengwar legally, but you won't.
  • But I'd really be impressed if someone did scanner software to read Elvish!

  • We'll know Elvish has made it when (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zoward ( 188110 ) * <email.me.at.zoward.at.gmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @06:58AM (#6613820) Homepage
    ... Google supports it.

  • Reality check. (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikedaisey ( 413058 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @07:59AM (#6613975) Homepage
    From the article:

    "The Tengwar, also called Feanorian letters after their inventor, were used in Aman and Middle-earth for writing many different languages."

    I wish there would be at least a token acknowledgement that all of this is fiction...not because people don't know, but because it is kind of creepy.

  • Evil? Pffft... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @08:54AM (#6614214) Journal
    Finally, here is my suggestion for the character string to use for writing the text on the Ring with Tengwar Cursive:
    AE5,Ex26Yw1E3/4^z= AE5,ExxwP%1Ej^
    AE5,Ex37zE1E3/4^z= X#w6Ykt^AT`Bz7qpT1Ej^
    It does look rather evil that way, doesn't it?

    H4H4 Y0U D0N7 UND3R574ND H0W 70 7YP3 1N 7RU3 L337! 3V1L MY 455!

  • Just the thing for stalking Liv Tyler with! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zhe Mappel ( 607548 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:30PM (#6622881)
    "Dearest Ms. Tyler/Arwen Evenstar,

    Just between Elves, I feel confident that I can tell you, fairest one, the following:

    O menel aglar elenath!

    So, did you like the font? Cool, huh? Found it on Slashdot, heh heh. What's Slashdot? Oh, you have so much to learn, my queen, so much. But there will be years for that (particularly after I level up my Everquest wizard a bit more, which will leave mornings and evenings open).

    When I heard that you wished you had more chances to speak Elvish in LOTR:TFOTR and LOTR:TTT and LOTR:TROTK, I knew that our love should no longer have to wait. For now we can speak and key Elvish to our hearts' content in our own private Lothlorien, or by IM or wirelessly!

    In fact, I've made arrangements, and mom says it's OK if we crash in the basement while we get on our feet. I realize that leaving the international limelight to marry an unemployed computer programmer is kind of unusual, but look on the bright side of "

    ~ snip ~

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