Glǽmscribe

Glǽmscribe (also written Glaemscribe) is a software dedicated to the transcription of texts between writing systems, and more specifically dedicated to the transcription of J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages to some of his devised writing systems (Tengwar, Sarati, Cirth, ...).

The current stable version is 1.3.0 (September 2022).

Official integration

Here is the official integration of Glǽmscribe's engine.

Features

• Handles a large variety of writings (Tengwar, Cirth, Sarati, Runes and more).
• Offers modes for a large variety of fictional languages (Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, Black Speech, Adûnaic, Telerin, Noldorin, Valarin, Westron), and non-fictional languages (English, Old English, Old Norse, Japanese).
• Extensible through a custom programming language dedicated to the writing of modes.
• Allow modes to be designed and programmed to have conditional behaviors depending on independent, custom options.
• Separates the handling of modes and charsets, making the mode files purely 'logical' and compliant with all fonts, and pushing back font issues to charset files.
• Compliant with opentype and non-opentype fonts, so that we can handle old-gen (Parmaite, Eldamar, Annatar...) fonts as well as new-gen ones (FreeMono, Telcontar, Eldamar Sarati - glaemscribe version with opentype features, ...), so that have a smooth transition between technologies.
• Offers a mechanism to compensate diacritic and ligature issues for non-opentype fonts through 'virtual characters', allowing mode files to be generic and far more simple to write.
• Has support for inlined, spelled tengwar (or any other writing, respectively) for complete control on the output.
• Has an official graphical, friendly integration (see above).
• Has a graphical IDE for helping users to write mode files.
• Uses a modified version of the eSpeakNG TTS Engine to handle english phonemic modes
• Has a command-line tool implementation (in ruby).

Programming Language

Glaemscribe has two separate implementations : a javascript library and a ruby library.

Mode development

If you're interested in developing a mode for Glǽmscribe, please read the mode development documentation.

Installation and integration

Here is the installation and integration documentation, for advanced users.

Changelog

Prior todos

• Deeper integration/design of full-featured OpenType Tengwar fonts.

License

Glǽmscribe is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License :

Glǽmscribe (also written Glaemscribe) is a software dedicated to
the transcription of texts between writing systems, and more 
specifically dedicated to the transcription of J.R.R. Tolkien's 
invented languages to some of his devised writing systems.

Copyright (C) 2015 Benjamin Babut (Talagan).

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Contributions, acknowledgments and thanks

• Glǽmscribe would never have been possible without the invaluable and unconditional help and wisdom of Bertrand Bellet.
• Special thanks to Måns Björkman Berg author of the outstanding website Amanyë Tenceli and its typefaces, a precious resource for Glǽmscribe's development, and Didier Willis for having ignited the inspiration of this project.
• Many thanks to Paul Strack for all his suggestions and careful examinations on the Tengwar modes during his integration of Glǽmscribe's engine into his eldamo project!
• Many thanks to J. Mach Wust and Roman Rausch for their clever thoughts and advice on the Tengwar & Sarati modes and fonts.
• Many thanks to Dan Smith, Johan Winge and Enrique Mombello for their incredible work on tengwar fonts ; this project would not have been possible without them
• Many thanks to Da Def from the Expanse TV series community for sharing his exotic Tengwar mode for Lang Belta (a conlang invented by Nick Farmer).
• Many thanks to Laicasaane for his very precise remarks on the charsets and modes, and the Visual Studio syntax highlighting plugin.
• Many thanks to Troy Alford* for his react integration, fixes and comments on the js src.
• Many thanks to Dmitry Kourmyshov for his very clever remarks and glances at the elvish modes.
• Many thanks to Leonard Wickmark for his suggestions during his integration of Glǽmscribe's engine into the elfdict project!.
• Glǽmscribe would never have come to be without the ceaseless and continuously renewed work of the great family of Internet Tolkienists, both on technologies (with several generations of transcribers and typefaces) and on knowledge shared and gathered on websites and forums. Neither would it exist without the devoted labour of all those that make the publication of Tolkien's linguistic works possible. A very big thank you to them all!

TTS Engine

Glaemscribe uses eSpeakNG for english phonemic modes, as a back layer to transcribe from english to IPA. Glaemscribe's fork of eSpeakNG as a certain number of modifications that are necessary to handle features that were important to Tolkien. Thanks a lot to all contributors of the eSpeak and eSpeakNG projects !

Other third party components acknowledgements

• Glǽmscribe's IDE uses CodeMirror for its code writing widgets.
• Glǽmscribe's IDE uses d3.js for the whole SVG behaviour of its debugger UI. Thanks to Mike Bostock for D3 (truly awesome)!
• Glǽmscribe's IDE uses tipsy for tooltips in its debugger UI. Thanks to Jason Frame!
• Glǽmscribe's IDE uses alertify.js. Thanks to Fabien Doiron!
• Glǽmscribe's IDE uses Font Awesome. Thanks to Dave Gandy!

Author

Glǽmscribe is written and maintained by Benjamin Talagan Babut.