Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings will recognise the Elvish script at the top of this page (in the Tengwar alphabet). If this is meant to be an example of what is typesettable in TeX/related software, what package is used to produce it?
[Tex/LaTex] What package allows Elvish in TeX
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Related Solutions
Without seeing all of the actual specifications, it's hard to tell exactly how much of this is very difficult to do in LaTeX or very easy. However, I would think that most can be done without too much trouble.
I would recommend looking into the memoir document class. It has extensive capabilities for customising almost anything you would need in a document, and has very good facilities for setting verse. It also has extensive facilities for putting text into margins. The documentaion is also extremely complete and can serve as a guide to document formatting generally.
Either you can use the class directly or you can build your own custom class using memoir as a base. I would start by producing a mockup of the document formatting using the memoir class, and then work to turn that into a custom class file by adding semantic markup macros for the various kinds of logical parts of the documents.
You can easily insert your TIFF images directly using the graphicx package, although if you have a way to recreate the images in a scalable format such as PDF that would be better.
As you know, LilyPondcan integrate well with LaTeX, so as you move to turning more of your music into LilyPond the integration will become cleaner.
With respect to automation, you don't need to learn TeX to do automation: you can automate things with LaTeX just as easily. There are also a number of packages for dealing with external data sources: datatool for importing spreadsheet type data, and latexdb for interface with an SQL database.
On a related note, but not necessarily directly useful, is the songs package, which can produce songbooks. This might give you some code to use for some aspects of the formatting.
Having said all of this, I would urge you also to think of how long you are going to be around to keep this all going. Once you leave, it's not going to be easy to get someone else to carry on with the fruits of all your labour.
If you are using a metafont font (which is increasingly rare) then the original source is written in MetaFont. Processing that source with metafont produces two files: the tfm file which encodes the font metrics (that is essentially just the size of each character, and information about ligatures and kerns with no information about shape) and a gf file which contains a sequence of bitmaps at a specified resolution (that needed to be specified to metafont, usually as part of a printer configuration). (The resolution by default got recorded in the file extension hence the example in your question)
tfm files are read directly by TeX but few programs could read gf fonts directly so they were almost always converted immediately to pk (packed) format which contained the same information in a more compressed form and could be read by dvi drivers such as dvips or xdvi.
So the end result was you could generate bitmap pk fonts exactly tuned to the printer you were using, not just the basic resolution but "blackness" control, ie how well the printer could cope with thin lines, or lines close together, metafont would if needed produce bitmaps with thicker lines etc. For printing on paper this produced very high quality output and for viewing on screen it could produce good results if you had high resolution and sensibly sampled and anti-aliased the bitmaps to the screen resolution, as dviview or xdvi did, but acrobat in its earlier versions made bitmap fonts more or less unreadable, which increased the urgency to develop type1 and other scalable format versions of the TeX fonts, which are the forms most commonly used today.
To see how the bitmaps were tuned to each printer look at modes.mf
/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/metafont/misc/modes.mf
on my system
It's a very long file with information such as
% From {\tt ..........compulink.co.uk}, 9 February 1994.
mode_def bjtenex = %\[ Canon BubbleJet 10ex (360dpi)
mode_param (pixels_per_inch, 360);
mode_param (blacker, .6);
mode_param (fillin, 0);
mode_param (o_correction, .6);
mode_common_setup_;
enddef;
which tells metafont how to make bitmaps tuned to that particular printer model. (You can see this isn't ideal for putting pdf on the web to be printed anywhere)
pixels_per_inch is the resolution
blacker is a measure of how much blacker (ie thicker) thin lines need to be before they disappear when printed on this device.
fillin controls diagonals so that the angles in the corners would remain sharp and not be "filled in" as an artefact of the resolution.
o_correction is overshoot correction to control whether curves should overshoot the bounding box (which works better at higher resolutions than lower)
These mode corrections have no effect on the font metrics in the tfm file, so tex would produce the same dvi file in all cases but dvips would use them to pull in printer-specific bitmaps depending which printer was being targeted with the PostScript.
Best Answer
Here's how to do that particular inscription (which is part of the ring inscription, by the way). I happen to know because I recently used it in a diagram!
Result:
As you can see, the input method is not particularly intuitive, but then I don't think that there is a particularly intuitive way of entering Elvish script. There are a few different packages on CTAN (search for
tengwar). The ones I looked at were:tengwarscript: uses commands as abovetengtex: uses an "asciification" of the lettersIn all cases, you will need to get hold of the fonts. Searching for
tengwar font latexbrings up all sorts of options, I think (it was a while ago) that I started looking on this site.(And just 'coz I can, here's the diagram wherein it was used):