Those dreadful Unicodes have to be learnt too (dont relish THAT thought,
though). I prefer a natural human language. Just cant stand those
unicodes. But this being an IT driven world I know one day I will have to
learn them. But I hope to have mastered Devanagari by then, and maybe even
Sinhalese too. Serve those unicodes right. They didnt even EXIST just few
decades ago.
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You seem a bit confused about unicode, so perhaps some clarification would
help. Unless you are talking about the numerical codes used as addresses
for unicode letters (if that's the problem, you just need a suitable
keyborad utility), what you seem to dislike is the scholarly romanized
version of Pali (and Sanskrit) with the diacritics it uses. This system has
been in use for over 100 hundred years and has some advantages, even if you
find it "dreadful". As you know, both Pali and Sanskrit do not have a
specific script -- they can be witten with any north Indian script (inc
Sinhalese) or other scripts derived from them such as Thai or Burmese.
Since the latin or roman script is the most wisely used and understood in
the world, it makes sense to publish material in latin script with the
necessary diacritics in order to reach the widest readership. Also in
pre-computer days, there was the problem of the availability of non-latin
fonts and typsetting. But if you are uncomfortable with diacritics, then
fair enough -- but you will still need to understand the latin script with
diacritics to use any of the standard dictionaries you will need for Pali.
Unicode is something quite different. When personal computers first came on
the market, there was little need for anything beyond a basic character set
of the latin letters plus a few letters with diacritics and accents for the
main European languages (the ANSII encoding). As the use of personal
computers spread around the world, there was a need for many other scripts
such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Georgian and all
the Indian languages etc etc to be encoded. At first, each of these scripts
was encoded on an ad hoc basis by various people or groups -- but there was
no standard method for each of these scripts. This meant (and still to a
certain extent) that you could only display text correctly using the same
font as the original used or else the text was completely garbled or showed
lots of blank boxes.
The purpose of unicode is to standardize the codes allocated to each letter
in every script currently used in the world, so that any suitable font could
be used or substituted. So unicode, as its name suggests, is just a unified
encoding system for letters and symbols. So apart from the basic latin
script and the extended latin character set which has all the diacritics any
body could ever want for any language, there is also unicode Arabic, Urdu,
Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Telegu, Oriya, Gurmukhi and all the other
Indian languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc etc.
However, most fonts that are available do not include all of these
languages, but tend to be specific for different areas of the world. There
are a few enormous fonts which DO include a very large range of the letters
and characters that have standardized unicode addresses, the most common
being Arial Unicode by Microsoft. The Titus Bitstream Unicode set is also
good for people wanting to use Indian languages. Both of these fonts are
readily available but neither of them are complete unicode sets.
I do not know anything in detail about the Gurmukhi script, but as a north
Indian script, I suspect that you should be able to i) find a Gurmukhi font
and input manager, and ii) type out all the Pali you want for your own
purposes in Gurmukhi -- you will just need to learn which diacritic letters
correspond to which letter in Gurmukhi. The only problem would be that
there is probably no published Pali material in Gurmukhi to use, but you
might just start a trend. I would also recommend that you do not use a
conversion program -- yes, it will save you time but you will learn more
Pali words if you have to type it out yourself manually.
Hope this clarifies the situation and you will learn to look upon Unicode as
your friend !