The Deseret Alphabet on Plan9

Interestingly, the Deseret Alphabet was accepted into the Unicode standard way back in version 3.1. So, there are code points for it right now.

If you're running macOS, there is a rather nice implementation of it in one of their system fonts (Baskerville, I think), which actually looks really good; it has ascenders and descenders which the original glyphs lack. I don't know about windows, but the default vga in Plan9 is a definite 'no'.

So, how to get Deseret Alphabet fonts in my 9front installation...

It's slightly more tricky than I thought, since many of the existing font options are only the piece that contains the DA glyphs, and not the ASCII range. Which means you can't just fire up rio with the new font because it's missing...well, everything you need for it to be useful.

Further complicating things is the fact that I don't know how to make mothra use a different font. My only option right now (that I can see) is to hget the page I want to look at. Lame.

The 2 fonts I found that work well are Analecta and Everson Mono.

Using ttf2subf I was able to easily convert them both. Everson Mono could be used as a default font, since it's a clean sans serif and looks ok. Analecta is much fancier, and the DA glyphs look great, but it's a little too flashy to be a default font.

The following is a sentence in the Deseret Alphabet. If you have a font for it, it should show up. Otherwise you get the little boxes.

𐐜𐐮𐑅 𐐮𐑆 𐑋𐐴 𐑁𐐲𐑉𐑅𐐻 𐐲𐐻𐐯𐑋𐐹𐐻 𐐰𐐻 𐑉𐐴𐐻𐐨𐑍 𐐮𐑌 𐑄 𐐔𐐯𐑆𐐯𐑉𐐯𐐻 𐐈𐑊𐑁𐐲𐐺𐐯𐐻.