My girlfriend wrote a paper this year about constructed languages and the people who create and use them, and typeset the title in elvish. Did you know that there are not one or two elvish typefaces for LaTeX, but in fact seven or eight?
Despite my abiding love of capitalism and enterprise, it brought me great joy to know that there are hackers out there still slaving away on the entirely esoteric and not 100% of us have yet caught the "everything should be about revenue" bug.
If I recall, that's not the reason for the abundance of fonts, as both Quenya and Sindarin use the same script. I think most of what you could find on LaTeX is your basic Tengwar script, but in different styles, so that they look like they were from different historical periods (one looked a bit like Celtic uncials, one almost like blackletter etc.).
(Boy, I'm really showing my nerd colors in this thread)
Hmm, I'll take your word for it, as I haven't looked, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the typefaces were runic (Cirth) rather than Tengwar (the celtic ones you mentioned, in particular).
Edit: Judging by the initial votes, maybe self-referential isn't the best approach. Trying again, "Is there is a LaTeX package for Zalgo?". Zalgo is form of (usually) Unicode text degradation used to simulate insanity and decay. It's frequently associated with Cthulu. I offer it as a real suggestion, and think it suggests a Lovecraftian madman quite well.
Basically, it needs a font rendering engine that is both poweful enough to display lots of combined diacritics from various scripts in parallel and lenient enough to actually try and do it by stacking them way outside the line.
It might be that only Windows has such an engine; font rendering is certainly one of Microsoft's strength.
I know that it works in LibreOffice (does that leave font rendering to the OS?) and in Omegle on Firefox (what renders the font here? Flash? Firefox? Windows?).
I'm able to read it fine with Chrome on both Windows and Linux systems. I just did a quick test with Chrome on Mac, and failed. I'm not sure if that is a difference in rendering, or just installed fonts. Here's someone asking a similar question: http://ask.metafilter.com/126672/Can-has-squamous-text
This is as good an occasion as any to note that tex.stackexchange.com is a fantastic place with friendly and competent contributors. There's already a wealth of informative answers that one can search through, enormously more useful than searching usenet or mailing lists. For those yet unconvinced, it's also an example that web 2.0 really works.
I'm not so happy with the result. The parchment is too three-dimensional, which clashes with the font. I'd recommend regular (or calligraphy) paper (maybe printed with a non-white background, if your printer is good enough), and then "aging" it. Tea or coffee is usually a good method, although simple crumpling might suffice.
Also, either for a medieval source or a 1920s document, block lettering seems a bit off.
But this really shows what's possible if you have programmatic control over your typesetting. I really should do some (La)TeX again…
For a 1920s document, I would actually expect it to be (badly) typewritten, but perhaps I'm injecting too much of modern myth of the times. Certainly cursive handwriting was considered to be vital at the time.
As for medieval, you can actually do pretty well with the medieval Italics or my personal favorite, the Carolingian miniscule. Blackletter is good for late period but it's very difficult for modern folks to read.
Not as hard as some period cursive variants (e.g. German Sütterlin). But once you go that far back, you'd also have to emulate the language, and I don't think that most GMs are a) up to that and b) willing to inflict this upon their players. Some fake Shakespearean might do, of course…
One could scour the net for a handwritten font that looks slightly arabic, considering where the Mythos' most famous madman came from…
Back in the days, I had some Postscript document that actually included some font, based on Edsger Dijkstra's handwriting. Given that PS is a full-fledge programming language, too, that could be the basis for some crazy per-letter randomization. (Although I bet TeX/MetaFont wizards could do something similar, and there might even be some OpenType fonts with enough glyph variants out there already)
One thing that seems to be missing from the answers is any sort of (pseudo)random modifications to the resulting text.
Can this sort of thing be done with plain LaTeX? I've seen trivial examples of randomness using LuaTeX; would that be a practical way to add some randomness to the typeset text?
Really? The answer with the highest upvotes appears to be rotating words to "random" angles, and links to a post[1] which has minimal code for just doing that.
I was actually thinking more about the very last sentence of the top answer where he says he doesn't know how to modify the font-size and spacing randomly. This led me to assuming the footnote angle thing was somehow specialized or insufficiently general. I don't really understand the code in the answer you linked to well enough to see how to apply it more generally.
Despite my abiding love of capitalism and enterprise, it brought me great joy to know that there are hackers out there still slaving away on the entirely esoteric and not 100% of us have yet caught the "everything should be about revenue" bug.