Setting up tests for Tengwar as it would appear IF it were encoded in Plane One IF the current slot in the roadmap were assured and IF the current proposal were accepted unaltered has been a valuable experience. (Yes, those are some mighty big IFs.)
Two characters won't display at all, either on Mac or PC. (Same glyphs display fine as PUA.) (Still don't know why, it could be the font...) We've also observed that BMP PUA support if the material is encoded as UTF-8 is very poor in some browsers. (Well, I knew that one already.) Doug Ewell mentioned the experience with Deseret, and how the proposal changed before being implemented, and others have also commented that there is no assurance that the current slot in the roadmap would be the final location. This is true, for all any of us knows scripts like Tengwar could end up in "Plane Five - The Astral Plane" (or something like that) which is reserved for fictional, fantasy, and extraterrestrial scripts. On the subject of encoding Tengwar in the Standard... here's my 2 ยข worth. The creator of Tengwar is not adding to the script, from what I understand, and a proposal to include the script has been around for a while. The character repertoire is fairly well established and if anyone finds any new ones, well, people are still coming up with new character proposals for Latin and Cyrillic. Keep the combiners consistent and simple, leave font and display technology out of any language-specific loop. If someone needs a voder to read Tengwar out loud based on a specific language, let them work out how to do it, it simply needn't be a font or display issue. (Or a character encoding one, for that matter.) Messing with combiners breaks existing applications (like TrueType) and there is already a user community using U+0000 to U+00FF custom fonts. The timing of the movie release is unfortunate. Perhaps the Tengwar and Cirth proposals will make it through all of the various committees in time for the release of the movie remake. Best regards, James Kass.
