FreeMonoTengwar

On this page:

Purpose
Download and Installation
Font Rendering
Ligatures

Purpose

The FreeMonoTengwar font is based on the FreeMono font from the 2009-01-04 GNU FreeFont. Currently, it only exists in medium weight. Being a monowidth font, its aims are not aesthetic. It rather aims at providing a Unicode tengwar font that will hopefully work on major OS. Most tengwar glyphs are just copy-edit modifications of existing FreeFont glyphs. This font includes FreeFont’s wide coverage of Latin letters, including for instance the IPA, and some other signs, including for instance the runes. That should allow this font to be used as a standard font in a text editor.

Download and Installation

For using the font on your computer, download the latest release by clicking on FreeMonoTengwar.2013-07-21.zip/download (alternatively, go to the Free Tengwar Font Project files and manually select a FreeMonoTengwar.[date].zip file). Open/unzip the file. Install the font file according to your system:

In Windows, draw FreeMonoTengwar.otf to the Fonts folder, found in the Control Panel.
In Linux, the usual location for the user’s font files is the hidden directory .fonts in your home folder. You may need to run fc-cache after you have copied FreeMonoTengwar.ttf there.
In Mac OS X, draw FreeMonoTengwar.ttf to either one of the folders /Users/(your User name)/Library/Fonts/ or /Library/Fonts/.

To use this font’s tengwar, you need a way of accessing the Personal Use Area characters where they are mapped. There are several ways to do this:

A dedicated keyboard layout, for instance one of the Free Tengwar Font Project’s Keyboard Layouts.
Copy-pasting, for instance from FileFormat.info’s Unicode Font Character Support site or from this project’s Mapping Table.
Using some kind of Unicode input help (many systems bring one along).

If you want to edit the font, get FontForge and edit the file FreeMonoTengwar.sfd that is included in FreeMonoTengwar.[date].zip. For details, see the file README.txt (also included in the ZIP file).

Font rendering

A tengwar font requires a complex rendering mostly due to many possible tehtar combinations. In a Dan Smith’s mapping tengwar fonts, this requirement is met by conveying up to four different versions of most tehtar and of some other signs. This font’s tengwar mapping, however, provides only one character for each tengwar sign.

The FreeMonoTengwar font aims at requiring as little smart font technologies as possible. That’s why it is a monowidth font. Since all characters have the same width, one size of tehtar fits them all without any need for smart rendering. This font only requires smart rendering for a number of ligatures.

The problem with smart font rendering is that each technology has its shortcomings:

Graphite runs only on very few applications such as XeTeX. It will also run on the upcoming version 3.2 of OpenOffice.
Apple Advanced Typography runs only on Mac OS X and on XeTeX.
OpenType, while more widely implemented than the other two smart rendering technologies (at least in parts), relies on your computer to have some previous built-in knowledge of how to do the smart rendering. Therefore, it is not suited for obscure scripts such as the tengwar. At least, a few basic OpenType features don’t require that previous knowledge.

This font’s ligatures are provided in Graphite as well as in OpenType. Like this, they will work in more applications. Applications that understand OpenType, but not Graphite will pick the OpenType information and vice versa. The rendering of the ligatures will still depend on the application where it is used. Just to provide some examples:

	Full ligature support	Partial ligature support[1]	No ligature support
Windows Vista[2]	Firefox OpenOffice 3.2 XeTeX	GIMP Internet Explorer WordPad	Microsoft Office Opera Safari
Ubuntu Linux	OpenOffice 3.2 XeTeX	Abiword Firefox Gedit GIMP Inkscape	Opera
Mac OS X	Firefox OpenOffice TextEdit XeTeX	GIMP Inkscape	Mail Opera Safari TextWrangler Terminal

Notes:

Partial ligature support on Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X means that all ligatures work except for the Zero Width Joiner Ligatures.
On Windows, the picture is more complicated and there are various degrees of partial ligature support.
Windows XP generally does not support ligatures, though partial ligature support may be found in specialized desktop publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign. Windows 7 has not been tested, though I’d expect it to be at least as good as Windows Vista.

Ligatures

These tables give an overview on (hopefully) all ligatures of the FreeMonoTengwar font. This is mainly for testing purposes. The display will depend on the capabilities of your browser. Of course, the FreeMonoTengwar font needs to be installed. Since some browsers don’t display the tehtar properly, they are placed on a dotted circle ◌.

Sa-rince Ligatures

The normal sa-rince tehta is designed to go with left double lúvar tengwar (anga, ungwe etc.), so these have no ligatures.

First character	Second character	Ligature
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	
	◌	

Tehtar Ligatures

For most doubled tehtar, the font includes a single character. Their display should be identical.

First character	Second character	Ligature	Alternative Single Character
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌

Modified Left Curl Ligatures

For joy of fun, these are commutative.

First character	Second character	Third character	Ligature
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌		◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌
◌	◌	◌	◌

Zero Width Joiner Ligatures

First character	Second character	Third character	Ligature	Alternative single character
‍[1]			◌‍	◌
	‍[1]		‍
	‍[1]		‍
	‍[1]		‍