Dear Bob,

> I'm a little confused at this stage with the discussion about studying
> with
> or without "Unicode" font and the need for a unicode keyboard etc.

[snip]

> Why does a student need these other types of font, like what is being
> discussed by the group?

As far as what you see on the screen, there is no difference. The
difference between unicode fonts and ones like Normyn is that that a unicode
font is a standardized font -- that is, the various letters will be found at
the same address in all unicode fonts. Normyn and similar are
idiosyncratic -- they just slot in the letters with diacrtics where
convenient -- if I type in a macron "a" for example, in Normyn, it comes up
as something else in the CSX fonts. I have a collection of these old
non-standard fonts and the difficulty is that I cannot easily switch to
another font style if I wish, and only people with the specific font can
display correctly anything I have written. Having said that, Normyn is a
fairly standard font for Pali studies, so there is not really any problem
for many users.

However, unicode is fast becoming universally accepted as the standard for
encoding -- as intended. Many e-groups now have the capabililty of
displaying unicode correctly, if your email browser supports unicode, and
most will eventually follow suit. I prefer to work using a unicode font
because I can easily type in romanized Pali and Sanskrit, together with
Chinese and other oriental scripts, with changing fonts all the time.

As for keyboards, there is no such thing as a unicode keyboard. What one
needs for any font with diacritics is some method of accessing them quicky,
so one can tweak one's existing keyboard to do so. It does not matter
whether one uses Normyn, CSX or a unicode font. Myself, I use alt + a, alt
+ i etc to access the various letters with diacritics, having first assigned
those letters to the alt key.

Hope this helps -- no need for embarrasment in asking about these things: we
all have things we are unfamiliar with.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge