Browsers

This site is designed and coded in strict conformance with the open standards of the World Wide Web Consortium and other relevant standards, including the Unicode glyph catalog, UTF-8 character encoding, validated XHTML Strict markup, and CSS styling. The degree to which your browser supports these standards will determine how well the articles and other pages will display.

This site is designed and implemented under Mac OS X, and looks its very best under Apple's free, fast, and exceptionally standards-compliant browser, Safari (see a sample screenshot here). All users of Mac OS X are encouraged to use Safari to view this site, though it also is tested and looks fine under Camino, Firefox, Netscape, OmniWeb, and Opera.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Internet Explorer on Windows (including version 6), unquestionably the most common browser on the web, also has exceptionally poor support for CSS. This site will therefore not display properly if you use that browser. If you use Windows, you will need to use some other, standards-compliant browser (for example, Firefox or Netscape) to display this site at all properly.

Font Size

This site does not specify any absolute font sizes. Therefore, depending on what specific fonts you have installed, the default font size selected for your browser, and the resolution of your display, the text of pages on this site may appear too big or too small. If so, simply use your browser font-size controls to adjust to a more comfortable size.

Fonts

To facilitate the scholarly discussion of Tolkien’s languages, this site utilizes UTF-8 character encoding and assumes that the reader will have at least one serif Unicode font installed having an advanced selection of foreign-language (esp. Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin Extended), IPA, and other linguistics-related glyphs.

The editor uses Adobe's Minion Pro OpenType font, in conjunction with Mac OS X's Lucida Grande and the the excellent, multi-platform, and free Gentium Unicode fonts for this purpose. The Times font installed by default on both Mac OS X and Windows XP is a less-capable, but servicable, alternative to Minion Pro.

(I had hoped to be able to employ Gentium solely, site wide. Unfortunately, Gentium is a work in progress, does not yet have a bold face — as will unfortunately be evident in some forms in the meantime — and does not play well with substituted bold-face fonts in PDF format. If/when this situation changes, I will configure the site to select Gentium if installed.)

For Tengwar characters, words, and phrases, this site employs the encoding developed and specified by Dan Smith, and prefers the Tengwar Annatar TrueType font created by Johan Winge.

For Rúmilian (Sarati) characters, words, and phrases, this site employs the Sarati Eldamar TrueType font by Måns Björkman.

For Valmaric characters, words, and phrases, this site employs the Valmaric Eldamar TrueType font by Måns Björkman.

For reference purposes, here are the most common font-family selection lists used on this site:

• Default text:
  {font-family: "Minion Pro", Times, "Times New Roman", Caslon, serif;}
• IPA text:
  {font-family: "Minion Pro", "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Arial Unicode MS", Caslon;}
• Combining Diacritics text:
  {font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Arial Unicode MS", Caslon;}
• Tengwar text:
  {font-family: "Tengwar Annatar", "Tengwar Parmaite";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) text, left-to-right:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar LTR";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) text, left-to-right with bar:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar LTR Bar";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) text, right-to-left:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar RTL";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) text, right-to-left with bar:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar RTL Bar";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) vertical text:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar Vertical";}
• Rúmilian (Sarati) vertical text with bar:
  {font-family: "Sarati Eldamar Vertical Bar";}
• Valmaric text:
  {font-family: "Valmaric Eldamar";}

In addition to these general cases, there are some more esoteric instances, such as forms with sonants, for which you will also need to have Gentium installed to see anything even remotely like the intended glyphs in your browser.

For further information and platform-specific recommendations for Unicode support, see the Unicode Consortium’s “Display Problems” and “Useful Resources” pages, and Alan Wood’s extensive listing of Unicode fonts by range.

PDFs

Due to the technical issues listed above, and to facilitate offline reading, searching, and archiving, every article on this site is also offered in a PDF version, via a link in the upper-left-hand corner of each article page. Simply click on the PDF icon in the upper-left-hand corner of any article page to download the PDF version.

Mac OS X users can view and search these PDF documents in the Preview application. Users of other platforms will need to download and install the appropriate version of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader.