Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[James Kass]

Unicode's mission is to provide a standard encoding for the world's 
writing systems.  Tengwar is one of those systems.  Suggestions made 
earlier regarding working around the estate's bans aren't about fooling 
anybody.  Rather the goal should be to get Tengwar encoded while 
honoring the estate's wishes.  Such a blind encoding shouldn't be viewed 
as "pseudo-coding".  As has been pointed out, Unicode does not encode 
glyphs, so Tolkien's glyphs aren't necessary.  Chart glyphs could be 
control pictures along the lines of "last resort" fonts.  If the naming 
convention for CJK ideographs and other encoded scripts isn't good 
enough for Tengwar, then name them something else.  Like "FICTIONAL 
CONSCRIPT TT LETTER A", or whatever.

As Richard Wordingham has pointed out, the encoding will assign 
properties to the characters so that applications can process them 
correctly.  Collation and so forth aren't IP.  The actual users of the 
script will know the score and non-users don't need to know.

Maintaining the status quo until some future estate epiphany means that 
non-standard data will continue to proliferate.  The current situation 
has some texts using ASCII-overlay fonts while other texts use CSUR 
encoding.

It would be wonderful if the Unicode cognoscenti would use their 
considerable knowledge and skills to come up with a solution which would 
satisfy everybody instead of pointing out why this idea or that idea 
won't work.  In the event of an eventual estate epiphany, proper charts 
could be added to the Standard along with a proper write-up for that 
range.  The "alias" fields could be updated appropriately.  Meanwhile, 
the encoding should avoid any mention of Tolkien, his works, his art, 
his glyphs, and his critters.