The Elvish Typesetting Corner
(still under construction)
As you can easily see, this page is still quite horrible... please, be kind and have patience. My long term plan is to build a little page where people can find tools to typeset with Tolkien's tengwar, certar and sarati using TeX/LaTeX.
In the Elder Days of Arda three great Elves devised, in Aman and in Endor, different ways of recording words: the older sarati, the more modern tengwar and the cirth (or certar, a famous offspring of which was the Angerthas Moria). These Elves were called in the histories Rúmil, Fëanor and Daeron (whether Rúmil and Daeron actually invented or simply reorganized existing material is a question akin to that if Homer really wrote Iliad and Odyssey). Those times, the peoples, the languages, the wars fought in Middle-earth, the heroes and the villains are now almost totally forgotten, but we can still learn some things reading the works of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth series.
In those days, removed from us by more than six thousand years, and for many centuries after the end of the Third Age, the race of the Homo Sapiens Typographicus was not borne yet and every written work of some importance was the result of the long labor and great skill of many, unknown scribes. Today, in a world where few write by hand and many use computer every day and where we have the power of reproducing high quality books in a fraction of the time used by ancient amanuenses, there is the need for a simple way to typeset texts with symbols invented by the sages of the Eldar.
Here you will find tools and fonts to satisfy your needs but, beware!, you should already know the tengwar and their cousins. Moreover, this site is dedicated to a particular typesetting system: TeX. If you know nothing about the former and the latter at all, try to have a look at here.
If you ever want to send me your constructive comments, pieces of code or new fonts (METAFONT or type1), feel free to do it. Feel equally free to send insults and spamming to someone else. Please, start the subject with [elvishtc] so that I will be able to filter it and read before other messages.
Last modified: Tue May 28 18:23:38 2002
