Keyboard Layouts
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Description
We provide keyboard layouts for different operating systems. They will produce the tengwar from the Free Tengwar Font Project fonts as defined on the page character mapping or from other tengwar fonts that use a similar mapping, such as Måns Björkman’s Tengwar Eldamar or Enrique Mombello’s Tengwar Elfica/Tengwar Beleriand.
Here is what the keyboard layout will produce (if you want a better image, you’re welcome to choose the file keyboard-20091211.pdf):
Be aware that the tengwar keyboard layout only provides a way of accessing the tengwar characters. They do not produce reasonable tengwar spelling by themselves. Indeed, if you just type ahead, they will most likely produce utter nonsense. You have to know the tengwar spelling from somewhere else, for instance from J. R. R. Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings or from Måns Björkman’s site Amanye Tenceli.
Installation on Mac OS X
It takes three steps until you can choose the tengwar keyboard layout from the Mac OS X Input Menu at the top right of the screen:
- Obtaining the files: Download the latest release by clicking on TengwarKeylayout-mac.2009-12-12.zip/download (alternatively, go to the Free Tengwar Font Project files and manually select the latest
TengwarKeylayout-mac.[date].zipfile). Open that ZIP file (doubleclick will do). - Installing the keyboard layout: Move both the files
tengwarQWERTY.keylayoutandtengwarQWERTY.icnsfrom the opened ZIP to either one of the folders/Users/(your User name)/Library/Keyboard Layouts/or/Library/Keyboard Layouts/(to uninstall, just remove them from there). Then restart your computer (or log out and log in again). - Selecting the keyboard layout: After restarting (or logging out), open the System Preferences, select International, then Input Sources (or Input Menu), find the entry tengwarQWERTY and select the checkbox next to it. Now you can choose tengwarQWERTY from the Input Menu in the menu bar at the top right margin of the screen, and after choosing it, the Input Menu will display the tengwarQWERTY icon:
Displaying the Keyboard Layout on Mac OS X
The easiest way to view the tengwarQWERTY keyboard layout on Mac OS X is the already mentioned file keyboard-20091211.pdf. Up to Mac OS X 10.4, the systems Keyboard Viewer could be used very elegantly to display the keyboards characters. Unfortunately, this is no longer possible because the Keyboard Viewer no longer allows the selection of a custom font. It has become utterly useless for viewing Private Use Area mappings.
You may use the free application Ukelele for viewing the keyboard layout. After installing, you can use it to open the tengwarQWERTY.keylayout file. Don’t be afraid of the warning about some missing output (not true); just click Don’t add and proceed. When you’ve opened the keyboard layout, you will need to select a font that contains the Private Usea Area tengwar from the Font menu (preferably a Free Tengwar Font Project font).
Installation on Windows
The latest release can be downloaded through this link: TengwarKeylayout-win.2009-12-14.zip. (Alternatively, go to the Free Tengwar Font Project files and manually select the latest TengwarKeylayout-win.[date].zip file).
To install, simply open/extract the zip file, and run setup.exe. This will install the Tengwar Unicode (QWERTY) layout, and also add it to the list of currently used layouts. If you have only used one layout before, you may notice that the Language Bar now is activated; this is a little applet that lets you easily change between your layouts. To modify the list of active layouts and the behaviour of the Language Bar, go to the Control Panel, Regional and Language Options.
Installation on Ubuntu Linux
The latest release is TengwarKeylayout-linux.2009-12-14.tar.gz.
In this file, you will find an installation script, install.sh, which has been tested on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), 9.10 (Karmic Koala), and 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). See README for more information. This layout will probably be usable also in other Linux distributions, or indeed in any system that uses X11; those systems may however be configured differently, so the exact location to place the layout in, and the files that need to be edited, may very well differ. In that case the provided install script should not be used.