Usage: This is a live transcriber from our Latin phonetic alphabet to the elvish Tengwar alphabet. Type a message in the bottom text area and it will be displayed in the equivalent elvish letters in the area above. Copy the link in the address bar and send your message to friends and colleagues.
Compatibility: The transcriber may not work in some browsers because I used fancy early-draft features of some other web browsers. I might go through the motions to make it work in legacy browsers some day, but this would be an expensive and unsatisfying project.
However, there is a much older tengwar transcriber that should suffice in the interim.
Purpose: The transcriber is suitable for showing
how the Sindarin
language might have been written and attempts to be consistent with
The King’s Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien’s book,
Sauron Defeated,
commonly called the
“General Use”
mode. I used the same mode for my
I’ve posted some sample transcriptions of Sindarin.
Technical details: The font used is a derrivative of Johan Winge’s Tengwar Annatar italic and italic alternate characters. The italic font is designed to resemble the Ring Enscription from The Lord of the Rings, presumably in Sauron’s own cursive.
The font uses an “encoding” established by Dan Smith wherein letters on an English qwerty keyboard are arranged to correspond with the Tengwar grid transposed on its side. Because there are not enough characters accessible on an the keyboard to represent all of the glyphs and alternate glyphs of the Tengwar alphabet, Johan’s Annatar provides some glyphs in an alternate font.
Because of limitations in rendering text on the web and the peculiarities of elvish fonts, it was not possible to alternate between the normal and alternate fonts in this application. Instead, I’ve created a custom version of the font that incorporates the alternate glyphs I needed for this mode using code points that are not so accessible on the keyboard, particularly for doubled long-O and long-U diacritics, the paired curls forward and backward, and also some rotated U-hook tehtar that were less prone to overlap with the underlying tengwar.
The particular limitation is that diacritics in elvish have no width
and are drawn before the cursor. Some of the diacritics I use are in
the alternate font. To put an alternate diacritic over the previous
tengwa, consonant, glyph, you have to put it in a
<span> tag with the alternate font face, but as a
result, the bounding box for the character has zero-width. I could not
find a way to render the text outside the bounding box of the tag.
This transcriber does not require the character encoding to use code points that are accessible on a qwerty keyboard, so it might be worthwhile to create a new font that seizes a neglected pane of Unicode and uses ligatures and kerning instead of zero-width diacritics. The difficulty is that every combination and cluster of diacritics would need to have a unique and customized code-point, anchoring diacritics precisely where they need to be or providing ligatures for difficult placements.
In the interim, I’ve engaged in the process of manually verifying the placement and use of diacritics for every combination of tengwa and tehta.
If you take a look under the hood, the transcriber is a CommonJS module and a jQuery plugin.
Further work might include:
