here is some background. I am torn between making a working layout and a fancy layout. Nobody is going to write in elvish with this, so the goal is just to make a believable elven keyboard.
The central part of the keyboard is composed by the main tengwars in order of relevance from left to right, from top to bottom. The rune on the Q key is the first elvish letter/sound (tinco), the one under the . key is the last letter (wilya). This makes sense from an elvish point of view, the letters are placed in a logical order.
All the runes are consonants. The vowels are always represented with the small dots/accents over or under the consonants (and sometimes in between).
Here comes the first issue. The position of the vowel on the consonant is not fixed. If you have 2 vowels for examples, you put one over and one under the consonant. That's why the Dan Smith's font has so many vowels around, BUT I thought that elves would have developed the automatic vowel positioning directly from the software (reread this sentence, how odd is it?
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When the elf writes the software automatically places the vowel in the best position, the elf typist doesn't have to worry about it. That's why I used only the 6 main vowels (and not all the possible combinations like in the Dan Smith's font).
Another interesting thing is that elves actually use tengwar to count (not numbers). The first letter/sound/rune is as we said "tinco", so "tinco" is also used as number 1. Later they added the numbers like we know them, so it would make completely sense to place the numbers over the first 11 elvish characters. Doing so we would free the whole first row where we could place additional sounds.
I decided to keep the layout as you see it because it looks better and it loosely resembles an ansi keyboard.
Over or under some characters you see a dash or a tilde. Those are special characters that can be triggered with the shift key. They are not positioned randomly, but in the most sense full position based on their meaning.
Lastly there are some sounds missing, that's why I'm implementing a pure elvish keyboard without contaminations coming from Tolkien's son or later tries to make a phonetically English-compatible language. This is an elvish keyboard for elves.
how this makes some kind of sense.