I first became interested in calligraphy when I was in 4th grade at Mill Middle School in Williamsville, New York. The School's emblem was a rather crude blackletter style M and spent many hours copying it, improving on it, and learning about different styles of blackletter. Since then I have spent much time with a broad pen, or a pencil, sketching letters and engrossed designs whenever I could. The initial R at the right was designed for my friend Ruth.      Since coming in contact with the computer, I learned that with certain software, one can actually design fonts which can be used on a computer, and immediately set about designing an Sindarian (Grey or High Elvish) font, after the Sindarian and and Fëanorian languages described in J.R.R. Tolkein's books. Please note that this font was originally developed in 1984-1985, long before the current popular movie-rendition of The Lord of The Rings was even being dreamed of.      The pictures above and below are illustrations of the Sindarian font I developed. The top picture appears on the title page of the unfinished, and unpublished Sindarian Dictionary (below) that I have been working on since the first J.R.R. Tolkein books were published in the United States. The font's keyboard layout is as logical as possible, which means that on an American keyboard the Roman letters match up with the Sindarian letters whose sounds are similar when possible. Unfortunately this wasn't always possible (Sindarian and Fëanorian contain some phonemes which are not represented by Roman letters for the English language), so the keyboard layout is a little odd, but learning to keyboard in Sindarian isn't really too difficult.      The Sindarian font is currently available for both Macintosh and Windows-based PCs, in bitmap, postscript type 1 and TrueType formats. It is shareware (meaning that I respectfully request that you send me $15 if you like it, and use it for stuff). Please contact me for details on obtaining this font.      In my spare time, I have also developed an entirely silly and useless font called DancingMen Normal. If you want to encode your documents so that only a select few can read them, or if you have some graphical need, this iseed, this is an excellent font. If not, well... it's a Windows-compatible TrueType font, and it's there. If you use it for anything, I would appreciate knowing about it.      I have been interested in orthography most of my life, and have studied a variety of different ways to represent the speech sounds which human beings are capable of making. After having studied a number of different ways of writing, including the writing of several different languages, I came across the work of Stanley Hess, professor of art at Drake University, who designed Tempered Notation, a way of writing human language specifically attuned to American English, in which the pronunciation of words is precisely represented and can be precisely reproduced by anyone who can read it. I also designed a TemperType font, an example of which is shown at the left.   Go back from whence you came, return to Salamandir's Home Page, or don't.