Tengwar Telcontar font features

Hello.
Could someone test the font features for Tengwar Telcontar [Free Tengwar Font Project: Tengwar Telcontar]? They say that the latest version (0.08) worked well in OpenOffice 3.2 when the Graphite features were introduced. The font hasn’t been updated since then, so I believe that something must’ve changed in LibreOffice.

The documentation of the font says there are some features like ligatures, decorations and the diacritics placement. The Font Features window shows all the features that should be available but they don’t work in my LibreOffice and only the default features are loaded.

I’ll be grateful for help.

——————————
EDIT: I added more detailed description. I use LO 7.2.6.2 on Windows 10. The font version is 0.08.
——————————

Tengwar is not in the Unicode (yet), and whatever font you use, the characters have to be placed in non-standard parts of the Unicode. One method is to put the characters where basic alphanumeric characters are, so once you have memorized the mapping you can type Tengwar right from your keyboard. Various keyboard layouts are available.

Another method, which I use, is simply to copy the required characters from a character table (I use BabelMap) and paste them into a document.

Tengwar Telcontar has 365 characters, most of them are regular characters like basic Latin, some diacritics etc. They are all placed in their proper places in the Unicode. 110 characters are Tengwar (letters, combining diacritics and other). They are all in the Private Use Area (PUA) block, from U+E000 to U+E07D plus U+F8FF.

To write a word in Tengwar I open BabelMap, then choose Tengwar Telcontar and scroll to select the PUA block. To compose a word I click (or double-click) required characters to put them in the Edit Buffer. Then I click Copy and I’m ready to paste the text into LibreOffice.

BabelMap:

Once the text is in LO Writer, I apply Tengwar Telcontar to it via Paragraph Style or Character Style (Western Text Font, not Asian or CTL, as someone suggested) and voila! My example below is the same word as the first word on page 2 of the documentation PDF of the font (section Decorated Tengwar).

My example:

Example from the font documentation:

So far, so good. What doesn’t work is the Font Features that can applied to achieve further decorative effects. For instance, there are three options for Decorated tengwar (see the double-lined vertical parts of the characters in the screenshot above): None, Word initially and All. Only the first one, which is default, works fine. The two remaining options don’t work.

Font features:

This problem exists for all features that the font should theoretically have: Connect tengwar applies some ligatures, Tehta on silme fine tunes the position of diacritics etc.

Here’s my ODT. All you should do is to apply Tengwar Telcontar to the text.
ttt.odt (8.6 KB)

You presumably want to use it in Right-to-Left language so you need to set the Features in CTL not Western Text. For CTL (Complex) you currently have Times New Roman set.

I downloaded the font from SourceForge. This Telcontar variant dates back to 2009 (last modification 2009-12-17 according to tables in file). It is a TTF font, not an OTF one. I couldn’t determine the exact type (LO no longer support Type 1 fonts). When FontForge opens the file, it complains about unsupported tables, probably the special SIL tables to implement Graphite behaviour.

Anyway, the font is quite old and no longer Unicode-compliant (it probably was when created but Unicode has evolved). It stores glyphs in the now named Supplementary Multilingual Plane starting at U+10000 which is now reserved for Linear B Syllabary. But IMHO this is not serious.

Most of the specific glyphs are in the Private Use Area block at U+E000. Among them, you have supposed combining marks (diacritics). I don’t know how font renderers handle such non-conventional combining marks: they are not located in standardised codepoints where special behaviour is expected. So how does the font signal the renderer to apply special rules? This may be the role of the tables but FontForge doesn’t handle them. It seems however that diacritics are correctly interpreted.

Edit your question to provide more details (or step by step procedure) on how to test the special features. Ideally, attach a sample file. Mention your OS name, LO version and save format.

Please, explain what should be expected for “Connect tengwar” “Tehta on Slime”. Remember that although we might have read some Tolkien’s novels, we are not specialists of the subsequent literature and thesis which have flourished in the aftermath of the publications.

Thank you. I edited my original post.

What puzzles me is the weird feature style designation after clicking on controls. Look at the font name in the toolbar. It reads Tengwar Telcontar:=2. The standard syntax is Tengwar Telcontar:key=2. The specific key is missing. As far as I know, key can’t be numeric. Consequently, if the font designer used a number to designate a feature, this number is probably removed by the library, being considered as a value and not a key. This perhaps worked ages ago and the OTF spec evolves since then.

Unfortunately I can’t tell if this is the case because FontForge, the font debugging utility, doesn’t allow me to examine the specific table in this font (making me highly suspect that the font is not really standar-compliant).

1 Like

Yes, I noticed that. You can’t even type that manually. I agree that it could work ages ago, but now it’s obsolete. Thank you for confirming.

I guess I’ll have to contact the creator of the font. Luckily he appeared on Reddit not so long ago saying he wants to work on it again.