CertaTeX
What's CertaTeX?
It's a package for writing with certar (or cirth,
if you're familiar with LoTR's appendices), obviously! Cirth
looks like the runes of our ages, but they're not our runes. Their
history is different; for a glimps read again the appendices of 
LoTR.
Ok, but why would you ever need such a strange beast like CertaTeX? Writing with cirth is relatively simpler than using tengwar, but there are so many gliphs that computer keyboard's keys are not enough and some gliphs "map" to a cluster of latin letters. Moreover, there's more than one single mode to use cirth and in different modes the same gliphs have different values... It's getting complicated, isn't it? Well, here is where CertaTeX could help you.
When CertaTeX is finished, you'll be able to choose one of the supported mode and, with a little re-encoding of a small number of cirth (following the same logic behind TengTeX's mapping of tengwar), start to typeset in a few moments. The user manual will detail almost everything you'll need to know, but it won't reproduce the cirth table of LoTR in full: for each supported mode you'll find a small list of the remapped cirth only
News
At the moment I haven't get back my copy The Treason of Isengard yet, so the modes there detailed are still in a beta state. Anyway, I'm seriously translating the user manual in English so someday CertaTeX will appear here for downloading with all the current available modes (The Treason of Isengard's ones as well).
I'd like to
have a deeper reading of The Treason of Isengard's
appendices, but CertaTeX is usable and bug-free (at least I haven't
found other errors yet) even without it. Recently I modified the
handling of some runes and their alternative shapes (for and example,
see certh #38 in the cirth table in LoTR's appendix)
to make it a lot easier for the final user.
Last modified: Sat May 24 08:12:53 2003
