Dear Frank,

<< snip >>. In Chinese, words are clearly distinct since

> each word is a symbol.

In Chinese and Japanese words may be one 'symbol' but are more frequently
composed of two or more (in Japanese with additions of kana, the phonetic
script.)

Certainly in Japanese, & I think in Chinese, text is written without spaces
between words, no matter how many characters they're made out of.

.

> My wish is that we could devise a Romanized pali script that was not
> dependent on the special characters not accessible from a standard querty
> keyboard

'We' have, there is, & it's called Veltuuis encoding and is the form that is
used in posts in this group (and on the Pali Text Society's Web site).

There's a page on the various systems, including Velthuis here:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bullitt/learningpali.html

I think most Pali sites choose to use one of the font systems,
unfortunately. If they had stuck to Velthuis someone could have written a
browser, or browser plug-in, to display it with the diactritics and enabled
web-wide searching.

ya.m p'ccha.m na labhati tam pi dukkha.m

(which I think translates as: "Not getting your wishes fullfilled really
sucks.")

metta, nich