Typesetting the Deseret Alphabet with L A T E Xa ndMETAFONT

The Deseret Alphabet was an orthographical reform for En- glish, promoted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) between about 1854 and 1875. An offshoot of the Pitman phonotypy reforms, the Deseret Alphabet is remembered mainly for its use of non-Roman glyphs. Though ultimately rejected, the Deseret Alphabet was used in four printed books, numerous newspaper articles, several unprinted book manuscripts, journals, meeting minutes, letters and even a gold coin, a tombstone and an early English-to-Hopi vocabu- lary. This paper reviews the history of the Deseret Alphabet, its Unicode implementation, fonts both metal and digital, and projects involving the typesetting of Deseret Alphabet texts.