Hello Paul,

> An acquaintance of mine at the Pali Text Society received the
> following query from a student. Would someone like to give it a try?

In MS Word one can just assign any keyboard combinations to any
characters via

Insert -> Symbol -> Keyboard shortcut

It's so easy that it obliterates any need for special software
keyboards, especially since most romanised Pali characters are from
English alphabet and don't require any special means.

A set of conversion macros for MS Word is available at
http://dhamma.ru/paali/macros.zip

Best regards, Dmytro