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Writing with Tolkien's Elvish alphabet (Tengwar) and LaTeX

Author:	Nathaniel Beaver
Copyright:	Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Contents

What's Tengwar?
Quickstart guide to using Tengwar fonts
Provenance status of Tengwar fonts for LaTeX
Legal information

What's Tengwar?

The Tengwar comprise an alphabet invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for writing Quenya or Sindarin (Elvish) in his writings such as Lord of the Rings. It can be used for other languages, too, including English.

This is a guide for getting started producing Tengwar with the LaTeX typesetting system. It will use the TengwarScript package. TengwarScript does not use Tengwar characters directly, since Tengwar has not yet been standardized into Unicode. Instead, it uses custom fonts. The fonts are not included in the TengwarScript package, presumably because the legal status of the fonts is not clear. The guide includes a companion script to automate the downloading, installing, and configuring of the fonts, most of which are TrueType fonts.

There are other methods for writing Tengwar with TeX, including XeTeX, but they will not be used in this guide. This will focus on producing PDFs. Look elsewhere for writing with Tengwar on the web.

This guide was tested on Debian unstable with TeX Live 2013, but it should be applicable to most LaTeX installs.

Quickstart guide to using Tengwar fonts

Installation

Option 1: Run the install script.

It is a bash script and requires that curl and unzip are installed.

If you are doing this for the first time, the script will download all the fonts into your ~/texmf/ directory. If you have downloaded these fonts before and the directory names are the same, existing files that are older than the new files will be overwritten.

Option 2: Do the same steps as the install script, but manually.

Ensure you have the TengwarScript package installed.

For example, run kpsewhich tengwarscript.sty. If you get an output such as:
```
$ kpsewhich tengwarscript.sty
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/tengwarscript/tengwarscript.sty
```
then you are fine. If you get a blank, then you need to install it. It is on CTAN and packaged in most Linux distributions. On Debian, it is in texlive-fonts-extra.
Run updmap --enable Map=tengwarscript.map.

If you do not run this command, you must add this line to every Tex file that uses Tengwar fonts:
```
\pdfmapfile{=tengwarscript.map}
```
Some tutorials recommend running mktexlsr or texhash on ~/texmf at this point. This is unnecessary.
Make the directory ~/texmf/fonts/truetype/.

This is in your local texmf directory, so you don't need administrator privileges. If you're not sure where texmf is, run this command:
```
$ kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFHOME
```
Download the Tengwar fonts you want and unzip them there.

Testing it out

After performing option 1 or 2, compile this document in your favorite LaTeX editor:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[all]{tengwarscript}
\begin{document}
\Tquesse\TTacute\Ttinco\TTdoubler\TTthreedots
\end{document}

This will use the default Parmaite font to write the Tengwar word quetta, meaning word. (This is an example from the tengwarscript documentation.)

Once you have a working installation, you can try more interesting examples.

For convenient Roman to Tengwar transcription, you will probably want to use a conversion script, such as the Perl tengwar transcriber.

Troubleshooting

If you get errors such as this:

!pdfTeX error: pdflatex (file Parmaite.ttf): cannot open TrueType font file for reading

try changing the font:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[annatar]{tengwarscript}
\begin{document}
\Tquesse\TTacute\Ttinco\TTdoubler\TTthreedots
\end{document}

or try explicitly adding the map file:

\documentclass{minimal}
\pdfmapfile{=tengwarscript.map}
\usepackage[annatar]{tengwarscript}
\begin{document}
\Tquesse\TTacute\Ttinco\TTdoubler\TTthreedots
\end{document}

Make sure the names of the fonts match the names in tengwarscript.map.

On Debian, this file is here:

/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/map/dvips/tengwarscript/tengwarscript.map

You will need to do a lot of renaming of the .ttf files if you take the manual route (Option 2).

Note: the tengtest.tex file in the documentation requires the texlive-lang-spanish Debian package.

Provenance status of Tengwar fonts for LaTeX

The TengwarScript package was updated to v1.3.1 in 2014, and it now points to archived URL for the fonts since many of the original websites have been taken down. However, all of the founts can be found with some searching.