Dear Paul,

Plese give my message to your acquaintance.



You don't have necessarily to forget about still using a wonderful tool,
which is a WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (no version of MS Word has ever
reached that degree of force, precision and ease of correcting errors).
I am still using it for most of my tasks, first of all with Sanskrit
diacriticals, of which Pali diacriticals are but a subset.

1) Unfortunately, contrary to what Ong Yong Peng writes, MS Word
versions higher (later) than 6.0 (95) convert WordPerfect 5.1 (and also
WPWin 6-7-8-9-10; I wasn't able to check version 11-12) INCORRECTLY, by
default (no doubt, by premeditation). It works correctly with characters
for CP 437 and 850, but incorrectly for most of other CP's, which means
also for Pali characters. Creating a macro within MS DOS of course can
solve the problem but if you are used to WordPerfect philosophy, you'll
probably prefer having macros within WordPerfect. And believe me,
WordPerfect Macros are more reliable than MSWord macros.

If you want, I can easily within a few minutes create for you a
WordPefect macro that will convert your Pali docuemnts to other formats
(let it even be MS Word). You'll have to send me the WordPerfect
keyboard file you are using, and I will sen you back. Tell me, which
printer you have installed within WP (the best solution is to join to
your *.wpk file also you *.prs file, and the wp.lrs file; please zip
them so that they dont' get changed in mail). You must also indicate me
into which standard you'd like them converted to.

You will use the macro within WordPerfect and save file and only next
import them to another wordprocessor.

2) You don't need to instal DOS in order to continue to use WordPerfect.
I an using it with Windows XP, using a new HP printer that does not
exist in my WordPerfect printer definition file, but which very easily
emulates HP 5L which I have installed within WordPerfect.

If you have problems with printing, consult
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ where you'll find dozens of tips
how to do it (and how to do many other things with WP DOS).

3) Of course, you can always use other people's suggestions. Unicode is
not a bad solution, but if you don't use other languages beside Pali,
using full Unicode fonts is like using canons to kill a fly. I will
rather recommend you using some smaller fonts (be them Windows encoding
based or
Unicode based), like those form Ulrich Stiehl's website
http://www.sanskritweb.net/fonts/


Regards

Maciek
mszieba@...


PS. Even if you don't like my solution, I will still be interested in
knowing your keyboard files for Pali within WordPerfect. So please, send
them to me, as you've offered.