Forums:Tengwar in articles

Is there any particular policy or guideline regarding the inclusion of Tengwar (or even Cirth) in articles? Should it preferably be an image? Or can it be Dan Smith-style tengwar encoding (which is supported by the vast majority of existing tengwar fonts—as an example: 1Rx#6 "tengwar")? Or is tengwar to be avoided, or what? I brought up this topic on Tolkien Wiki forums a few weeks ago, before I finally realized that Tolkien Wiki is practically deserted these days. - Gilgamesh 04:24, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

To my knowledge there is no existing policy.

I would personally say that we should stick with images, for the simple reason that not everyone will even have the fonts installed and therefore looking at, for example, "1Rx#6" might be really irritating for them. I know if I didn't have them installed I would find it annoying seeing gobbledegook and then be told I need to trundle off and install the fonts myself. --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 07:52, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Currently, any such page that has tengwar on them has the Font template telling them which font was used. They are fonts that (when possible) use Smith's keymapping. But personally, I wouldn't mind using images. -- Ederchil ^{(Talk/Contribs/Edits)} 08:33, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

If images are preferred, I could try to make PNGs or SVGs of all sorts of tengwar words. - Gilgamesh 09:29, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

In my case, I have many fonts with the Dan Smith encoding installed, and only a few others. The example in your first post is rendered with the correct characters, but with lousy spacing (the tehtar are placed reasonably correctly above the tengwar, but with a letter-wide space following) {IE8 under Windows Vista}. I know that a couple of people, among which the creators of Tengwar Annatar and Tengwar Parmaite and one of the most important advisors of the Unicode Consortium are working on proper Unicode encoding of Tengwar and Cirth and proper Unicode fonts to match. They are also investigating the possibilities of using tengwar in webtext, with proper tengwar rendering under as many browsers as possible at present. See also http://freetengwar.sourceforge.net/

So, at the moment I think we should prefer images, but it is likely that in the not too distant future proper use of tengwar in webtext will become a viable proposition, and from then on that will be preferable. -- Mithrennaith 19:07, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I shall wait for the latter option. - Gilgamesh 22:45, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Over a year later, methinks that not too distant future has already arrived. All major browsers now support @font-face embedding.

Tengwar font embedding is already being used on the internet, see Tengwar Blog – Experimental blogging in and about J. R. R. Tolkien's Tengwar script or a German-language phpBB Tolkien linguistics forum: Mellyn Lammath :: Thema anzeigen - Tengwar im Forum eingeben. Eine Anleitung ('Melly Lammath :: Show thread - Typing tengwar in the forum. A tutorial').

How about embedding the tengwar on Tolkien Gateway?

Advantages:

• Enable direct tengwar input.
• FreeMonoTengwar is pure FLOSS; its license explicitly allows embedding.
• By default, embedding works on all current major browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari).
• FreeMonoTengwar is simple enough so it does not require smart font rendering (which currently only works reliably on Firefox 4).
• Since FreeMonoTengwar encodes the tengwar in the personal use area of Unicode (according to the most recent CSUR discussion paper), there is no danger that the signs will be mistaken for nonsensical Latin characters if the embedding fails.
• Actually using the tengwar will further the cause of tengwar unicodification (currently the tengwar are among the Proposals in Early Committee Review – remember that Klingon unicodification was rejected, among other things, because of lack of use among the Klingon community, see Archive of Notices of Non-Approval)!

Disadvantages:

• The input requires the installation of a special tengwar keyboard layout.
• The personal use area characters are not standardized.
• The embedded font will increase the document size of a single tolkiengateway page by approximately 25% (but only on the first page loaded and only if tolkiengateway has not been cached – subsequent pages have no increased size since the font resides in the CSS; this percentage is based on the assumption that the a typical tolkiengateway has about 250KB and the font about 60KB).
• FreeMonoTengwar is not the nicest of tengwar fonts.

Machsna 14:08, 8 April 2011 (UTC)