Repository of (patched) fonts used by Glǽmscribe

This is the place where are stored and tracked the fonts that have been patched specifically for Glǽmscribe . Due to the precision needed by some modes (and users), due to the fact that a large number of them were designed at a time where technologies were not as advanced as today, and for a lot of other reasons, not all fonts (especially Tengwar fonts) could bring the level of detail needed for pointy transcriptions. Moreover, since there had been no real strict norm to describe how they should be designed, these fonts are not always compliant one with each other.

That's why, at some point, they needed some patching ; here are these fonts, with a backlog of the modifications brought to them.

All these fonts are the propriety of their authors. Tengwar, Sarati and Cirth are writing systems invented and designed by J.R.R. Tolkien.

A note on unicode : Since Glaemscribe 1.2.0, legacy fonts with a Dan Smith layout have been deprecated. They can still be found in the build/**/legacy directories (with the *-glaemscrafu suffix) and their charsets are still available as tengwar_ds_*.cst files, these fonts had already been patched to solve some problems and add missing chars.

Since 1.2.0, they have been transformed to a new generation of transitional format (with a new *-glaemunicode suffix) and remapped to unicode to be closer to the norm proposed by the Free Tengwar font project (emending itself the original proposition from Michael Everson). The main reason is a transitional one ; every new font should try to tend towards the unicode norm, cleaner, more robust. Having each character at the right place is certainly the best way to go if one wants these writings to be processable by modern tools without problems.

So the aim was, at first, to have a first port of these legacy fonts. Still, part of their mechanisms are still legacy (they still contain the multiple versions of tehtar, for example) because the OpenType features to have correct diacritic placement, ligatures, stacking and so on are difficult and long to implement and to design. Thus, all these legacy variants have been mapped in far blocks of the Private Use Area of the Unicode. That chosen hacky and transitional mapping can be consulted here :

Transitional Mapping

See also the comparison chart for tengwar fonts for an overview of all features and changes.

To summarize, Glǽmscribe relies at the moment on three families of fonts :

1. The -glaemscrafu fonts. Legacy.. These are patched versions of the original fonts made by their authors. They are patched to solve a certain amount of problems due to the fact that their mapping overlaps the real alphabets unicode mapping - breaking correct word/line wrap in navigators amonst other problems. Also, the original fonts were sometimes lacking some attested mandatory characters.

2. The -glaemunicode fonts. Transitional. They are generated automatically from the -glaemscrafu fonts, but they remap characters to the unicode mapping defined by the Free Tengwar Font project. However, since these are not opentype fonts, they do not handle automatic tehtar placement, ligatures & so on. Instead, they remap somewhere in the private use area the multiple variants of tehtar, consonant modifiers & co that were present in the original fonts. This is hacky, but solves a certain number of rendering problems.

3. The OpenType fonts. Experimental. These fonts are the way to go for Tolkien specific matters. They are able to handle by themselves the placement of diacritic & modification signs, by embedding some kind of "coding rules" that describe how to handle certain sequences of logical characters and perform substitutions, ligatures, placements, etc. The Free Tengwar Font project currently offers two fonts of this kind : Tengwar Telcontar & Tengwar FreeMono. Glaemscribe now supports these awesome fonts, but since their development is not totally finished and still lack some polishing (IOHO), we consider them as "experimental". But truly, this is the future.

The complete of list of changes made from the original versions of the fonts :

Tengwar Eldamar, created and designed by Måns Björkman Berg

• The regular and alternate fonts have been merged into a single file so as to simplify its use as a WebFont.
• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• Double tehtar for long e have been added.
• Superior and inferior dash and tild consonant modification signs have been added for halla, telco and ara.
• Moved pustar combinations (4/4-squared/5).
• Added 4-halfed pustar combination.
• Added missing non-breaking space (U+00A0)
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Parmaite, created and designed by Måns Björkman Berg

• The regular and alternate fonts have been merged into a single file so as to simplify its use as a WebFont.
• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• Double tehtar for long e, o and u have been added.
• Superior and inferior dash and tild consonant modification signs have been added for halla, telco and ara.
• Added pustar combinations (4/4-halfed/4-squared/5)
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Elfica, created and designed by Enrique Mombello

• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• Added pustar combinations (4-halfed @U+10FB / 4-squared @U+2E2C)
• A serie of 4 inferior tehtar has been added for the reversed, small, u-curl.
• Superior and inferior dash and tild consonant modification signs have been added for halla, telco and ara.
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Annatar, created and designed by Johan Winge

• The regular and alternate fonts have been merged into a single file so as to simplify its use as a WebFont.
• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• The circle inf tehta for Regular and Bold (XS version @ 0xA9) has been translated, it was too high.
• Added pustar combinations (4/4-halfed/4-squared/5)
• Added dash+wave / inf+sup (XS version @U+200,201,202,203 for consonant modifications for telco/halla/ara.
• Added missing non-breaking space (U+00A0)
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Annatar Bold, created and designed by Johan Winge

• The regular and alternate fonts have been merged into a single file so as to simplify its use as a WebFont.
• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• The circle inf tehta for Regular and Bold (XS version @ 0xA9) as been translated, it was too high.
• Added pustar combinations (4/4-halfed/4-squared/5)
• Added missing non-breaking space (U+00A0)
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Annatar Italic, created and designed by Johan Winge

• The regular and alternate fonts have been merged into a single file so as to simplify its use as a WebFont.
• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• Added pustar combinations (4/4-halfed/4-squared/5)
• Added missing non-breaking space (U+00A0)
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Tengwar Sindarin, created and designed by Dan Smith

• The vast majority of tengwar have been remapped to the FTF/Everson unicode points.
• Added MH (@ 0x161).
• Added Beleriandic MH (@ 0x180).
• Added double tehtar for long e, o and u have been added.
• Added e grave tehtar .
• Added pustar combinations (4/4-halfed/4-squared/5)
• Added num_12
• A serie of 4 inferior tehtar has been added for the reversed, small, u-curl.
• Added four 'below' versions of e-tehta grave.

Sarati Eldamar, created and designed by Måns Björkman Berg

• GPOS OpenType tables and anchors have been added to manage diacritics.
• The spacing between characters has been slightly increased because it looked a bit small.