Editing Deseret alphabet (section)

== Encodings ==
{{See also|Deseret (Unicode block)}}
[[File:Deseret glyphs ew and oi transformation from 1855 to 1859.svg|thumb|Between 1855 and 1859, the way most people wrote the glyphs <span lang="en-Dsrt>𐑏</span> and <span lang="en-Dsrt>𐑎</span> changed, causing encoding problems when attempting to transcribe documents using the latter glyphs with Unicode.<ref name="Beesley2004"/>]]

The Deseret alphabet (U+10400–U+1044F) was added to the [[Unicode]] Standard in March 2001 with the release of version 3.1, after a request by John H. Jenkins of [[Apple Inc.|Apple]], making it one of the first scripts to be added outside of the [[Basic Multilingual Plane]].<ref name="Beesley2002" />{{rp|6}} The letters 𐐧 (ew) and 𐐦 (oi) were added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.unicode.org/Public/4.0-Update/UnicodeData-4.0.0.txt|title=The Unicode Standard, version 4.0: UnicodeData-4.0.0.txt|website=The Unicode Consortium|access-date=2017-01-25}}</ref>

According to Kenneth R. Beesley, who submitted the proposal to expand the encoding,<ref name="Beesley" /> "Unicode fonts based on the current heterogeneous collection of [[glyph]]s will be useless for any practical [[typesetting]] of 40-letter Deseret Alphabet documents."<ref name="Beesley2004">{{Cite book|last=Beesley|first=Kenneth R.|title=TeX, XML, and Digital Typography |chapter=Typesetting the Deseret Alphabet with LaTeX and metafont |year=2004|chapter-url=http://copper.chem.ucla.edu/~jericks/Historical%20or%20Technical/History%20Looking%20Backwards/Ken%20Beesley/Typesetting%20the%20Deseret%20Alphabet%20with%20LATEX%20and%20METAFONT.pdf <!-- https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb25-0/beesley.pdf is the TUGboat version. Page numbers differ, so we don't put it in URL! Text exact same. -->|journal=[[TUGboat]]|series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science|publisher=[[TeX Users Group]]|volume=25|issue=[[Zero indexing|0]]|pages=68–111|doi=10.1007/978-3-540-27773-6_7|isbn=978-3-540-22801-1|access-date=12 January 2017|archive-date=9 May 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170509044613/http://copper.chem.ucla.edu/~jericks/Historical%20or%20Technical/History%20Looking%20Backwards/Ken%20Beesley/Typesetting%20the%20Deseret%20Alphabet%20with%20LATEX%20and%20METAFONT.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref>{{rp|29}} This is because the Unicode Consortium chose to use glyphs from 1855 as the reference glyphs, while by 1859 those glyphs were already outmoded and replaced with newer glyphs. Beesley thus recommends using [[LaTeX]] along with his [[Metafont]] {{Monospace|desalph}} font to typeset Deseret text,<ref name="Beesley2004" /> but [[font]]s which use the alternate glyphs for the two codepoints in question would also work for transcription of 40-letter Deseret texts written during and after 1859.

{{Unicode chart Deseret}}
On 25 February 2016, the [[Library of Congress]] approved an [[ALA-LC romanization]] for the Deseret alphabet.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/deseret.pdf|title=ALA-LC Deseret Romanization table|website=[[Library of Congress]]|access-date=26 February 2016|archive-date=4 March 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304131316/https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/deseret.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> The table can be used to display approximations of titles in non-Latin scripts using the [[Latin alphabet]] for use in library catalogs that do not support non-Latin alphabets.