The Unicode Standard is a new 16-bit character set under development by various movers and shakers in the computer industry such as Microsoft, Digital, HP, and my own Apple Computer, Inc. Its goal is to provide a common way of representing all human writing systems in current or past use. As such, it's quickly becoming the lingua franca for text on the Internet.
The original design of Unicode allowed the inclusion of some 65,534 characters, with some six thousand of those "private use characters" which basically anybody can use any way they like. When it became clear that this simply wasn't enough to accomodate all the large, rare character sets such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and uncommon Han ideographs, an extension mechanism (surrogates) was added to the standard which allow the addition of another million characters.
The problem was, a vicious circle quickly arose. Nobody started to implement surrogates because there were no characters encoded using them, and nobody wanted their characters to be encoded using surrogates because nobody was implementing them.
To break the cycle, someone needed to propose for encoding a writing system which was at once real and at the same time so rare and/or dead that nobody would object to its being encoded with surrogates. I proposed the Deseret Alphabet in late 1996 as such as script, and it was quickly accepted.
Being approved for adoption and being adopted are two different things, however. It was March 2001 before the Deseret Alphabet was formally added to Unicode, with the release of Unicode 3.1. Other scripts, such as Shavian, the Cypriot syllabary, Linear B, Gothic, and Old Italic have also been added to Unicode using surrogates and dozens of additional scripts have been earmarked for encoding that way. The Unicode encoding also includes two rare ligatures which were included in some of the formal descriptions of the Deseret Alphabet.
As part of Unicode, the letters of the Deseret Alphabet are the scalar values from 0x00010400 through 0x0001044F.
Characters in Unicode are assigned scalar values, a 32-bit number that uniquely identifies them. There are three basic schemes for mapping these scalar values into actual sequences of bytes used on a computer.
UTF-32 has been recently adopted. This is a thirty-two bit form of Unicode. Each scalar is represented by itself.
UTF-16 is the oldest form of Unicode. It uses one or two sixteen-bit words to represent a scalar value. If the scalar is less than 0x00010000, then the scalar value is packed into sixteen bits; otherwise, it is split into a two surrogate values. Interconversion between the scalar value (SV) and the high and low surrogates (HS and LS) is accomplished by the following algorithms:
SV = 0x00010000 + ( HS - 0xD800 ) * 0x0400 + ( LS - 0xDC00 )
HS = ( SV - 0x00010000 ) / 0x0400 + 0xD800
LS = ( SV - 0x00010000 ) % 0x0400 + 0xDC00
UTF-8 is a variety of Unicode which is intended for using Unicode in situations or applications which are designed for text that comes in eight-bit chunks. Many older operating systems and transmission protocols are like this. (C programmers will be familiar with the idea of strings being represented as arrays of characters ending with a 0 byte which serves as an end-of-string flag. Since many Unicode code points have one byte or the other equal to zero, these characters will break existing C libraries. UTF-8 is one solution to this problem.)
UTF-8 also has the advantage that characters from the ASCII character set in their traditional representation of 0x00 through 0x7F are represented by the single bytes 0x00 through 0x7F. This means that English text in UTF-8 looks pretty much as it has for the past thirty-five years.
The transformation between UTF-16 or UTF-32 and UTF-8 is relatively straightforward and described in The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0, pp. 45–47.
(The whole issue of encoding forms of Unicode is complicated by the fact that different computer architectures don't agree on how to combine two eight-bit bytes to form a single sixteen-bit word.)
It is strongly recommended that any implementations of the Deseret Alphabet conform to Unicode/10646, if at all possible.
It is most decidedly improper to hijack the standard ASCII code points and assign various Deseret Alphabet letters to them so as to make typing easy. This is considered a very Bad Thing™ in the world of text encodings.
Overview of the Deseret Alphabet
The Book of Mormon in the Deseret Alphabet
The Deseret Alphabet and Computers