Tengwar Transliteration Progress

In a rare departure from my usual habits, I've managed to maintain enough interest in a hobby programming project to actually have an update beyond the initial release. Therefore, I present to you the Tengwar Transliterator version 1.1.

You can check it out here.

Its new features, in a nutshell, include:

The tricky word "governments"
rendered in Tengwar Telcontar,
Tengwar Formal CSUR, and
FreeMono Tengwar

• Orthographic transliteration - This is now the default transliteration mode. It provides a letter-by-letter approach to transliteration, as opposed to the phonetic approach in the first release. Phonetic mode is still available, but the orthographic mode produces output that is much closer to how people typically transliterate English into Tengwar.
• Reverse transliteration - It is now possible to transliterate back to Latin characters from Tengwar. This feature should be considered to be in a beta stage, however.
• Tengwar font selection - Users may now choose one of the three fonts provided by the Free Tengwar Project for displaying Tengwar text. Firefox users are strongly encouraged to choose the excellent Tengwar Telcontar font. Sadly, this Graphite font does not display correctly in other browsers, to my knowledge.

What's Next?

• The results of the orthographic mode are actually even better than I expected. With some key enhancements, it should be able to be modified to become a Common Mode transliterator, which has been my goal the entire time. I hope to release the Common Mode transliterator some time this autumn.
• Now that transliteration from Tengwar back to Latin characters is supported, I would also like to integrate a virtual Tengwar keyboard to make Tengwar input much easier.
• I am also looking forward to broadening the scope and adding support for other Middle-earth alphabets such as the Cirth, and the futhark style runes found in The Hobbit.
• Code refactoring! This is badly needed. A lot of the new features have been pretty rapidly prototyped, and I'm looking forward to refacting the code into something nice.

Have a feature in mind that you'd like to see, or have other feedback? Leave a comment or get in touch with me.

And as always, the code is available on Github. It's a horrible monstrosity at the moment, though.