Dan Smith
Daniel Steven Smith is a programmer and science fiction hobbyist who maintains a "Fantasy Fonts for Windows" website.
In 1997 he created Tengwar fonts, the first being titled "Tengwar Quenya" and "Tengwar Sindarin". Since then he created other variants (ornamental/capital tengwar shapes etc) and Cirth fonts as well as historical Rune fonts as the ones seen in The Hobbit.
His website contains descriptions of the best known Tengwar modes and have been a usual reference point.
Creations
- Tengwar Quenya (regular, capitals, doubled-stroked capitals, and alternate)
- Tengwar Sindarin (regular, capitals, doubled-stroked capitals, and alternate)
- Tengwar Noldor (regular, capitals, doubled-stroked capitals, and alternate)
- Cirth Erebor (regular, barred and double-barred)
- Cirth Erebor Capital (regular, doubled-stroked and pointed)
- Germanic Rune fonts (reg, 1-bar, & 2-bars)
- AngloSaxon Rune fonts (reg, 1-bar, & 2-bars)
- Dwarvish Rune fonts (reg, 1-bar, & 2-bars)
Note that the tengwar fonts differ only visually or stylistically (they all utilize the same keymapping) and are not language specific. The names "Quenya" and "Sindarin" are used only as their titles and have nothing to do with the languages themselves.
Keymapping
Dan Smith had to devise a layout to fit the tengwar into the keyboard. He decided to divide it into rows and series as appear in the tengwar table of Appendix E. That way for example, the first 4 Tengwar that consist the Row I (Tinco, Parma, Calma, Quessë) are assigned to the leftmost keys of the keyboard (1, q, a and z). The next 4 keys correspond to the Row II and so on.
The uppercase letters are used for the tehtar and alternative forms. Extended characters correspond to Tengwar numerals, punctuation marks and less common tehtar or letters.
This system has been adopted as an unofficial de facto standard by other font makers for their tengwar fonts (for example Parmaite, Formal, Cursive, Elfica, Annatar, Hereno and possibly others), therefore maintaining compatibility with its other. Also, there has been some software that help transcribe a Roman text to this keymapping.
External links
- Who is Dan Smith?
- Page describing and explaining Smith's keymapping (through Google translate)
- Writing with Elvish fonts Tutorial about utilizing the fonts that follow Smith's keymapping
