I was recently gifted what I believe to be a Pilot Metropolitan Taupe Lizard (see photo)
Can anyone tell me if I’ve identified it correctly?
This is my first squeeze converter. Is it opaque? If so how do you guesstimate ink levels? All my other pens have piston converters with transparent reservoirs, so you can just look.
Of course, the encoding is the real challenge, since tengwar isn't included in unicode. If you have the patience for LaTeX and thus not actually typing in tengwar, but instead stuff like /Toore/TTthreedots/TTdorbelow, you can get very precise layout with the TengwarScript LaTeX package (https://ctan.org/pkg/tengwarscript?lang=en)
Many believe that Meta is using an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy here. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I've done only a little experimenting with bright inks, but it seems like unless the nib is quite broad the color gets lost. This now has me hunting for inexpensive stub nibbed pens :)
I haven’t done much of it. I have another Pilot Metropolitan with a medium nib which writes very smoothly. The stub nib isn’t as smooth, although my initial experiments have been on paper that’s not especially fountain pen friendly.
I also notice that I have to write more slowly with the stub nib or I get line widths that vary unexpectedly. Pilot calls it a calligraphy nib and I think it really is, rather than something you’d use for everyday notetaking. Perhaps those whose handwriting is more consistent have better results.
It’s too bad because I very much like how stub nibs let colored inks show. I’ve noticed that with narrow nibs, sometimes a colored ink doesn’t really “read” as colored when you look at it.