On Jul 9, 2006, at 7:24 PM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> No idea what you're referring to (no, I won't click the link), but if
> it's printing the texts in the Deseret instead of the roman alphabet,
> then that's nothing but font substitution.
>

No, because the Deseret Alphabet isn't a cypher for Latin. It's a
completely different beast, intended to provide a phonetic spelling
of English. (If nothing else, it has twelve more letters.) You can't
convert from Latin to Deseret without knowing how to pronounce the
words.

What's being referred to was a project I undertook some years back to
convert the non-Biblical LDS scriptures from Latin to Deseret, about
eight hundred pages' worth of text. The point is that conversion
from non-phonetic Latin to phonetic Deseret really didn't take that
much effort.

> I have no idea why font-engineers are so fascinated by Deseret. It's
> never been used for anything.

Well, it's never been used for anything terribly important. Probably
the most surprising (and useful) DA text is an English-Hopi
dictionary that Ken Beesley found in the LDS Church Archives, with
the DA used for Hopi. It antedates any other record of Hopi
phonetics by the better part of a century.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/