the Kharosthi script and Greek writing were used by James Prinsep to decipher the Kharosthi abugida. This script became particularly significant for the study of early Buddhism following the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist texts. The transmission of written Pali has retained a universal system of alphabetic values, but has expressed those values in a variety of different scripts. In the 1840s, Thai king Mongkut invented the Ariyaka script, adapted from the Greek and Burmese-Mon scripts, as a universal medium for transcribing Pali, intended to replace other existing regional scripts, including Khom Thai and Tai Tham. The script did not come into popular use. Theravada Buddhist-professing regions use distinct scripts to transcribe Pali: Myanmar: Mon-Burmese Cambodia: Khmer India: Devanāgarī Laos: Lao (since 1930; historically Tai Tham) Sri Lanka: Sinhala Thailand: Thai (since 1893; historically Tai Tham and Khom Thai) Alphabet with diacritics Since the 19th century, Pali has also been written in the Roman script. An alternate scheme devised by Frans Velthuis, called the Velthuis scheme (see § Text in ASCII) allows for typing without diacritics using plain ASCII methods, but is arguably less readable than the standard IAST system, which uses diacritical marks. The Pali alphabetical order is as follows: a ā i ī u ū e o ṃ k kh g gh ṅ c ch j jh ñ ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ t th d dh n p ph b bh m y r l ḷ v s h ḷh, although a single sound, is written with ligature of ḷ and h. Transliteration on computers There are several fonts to use for Pali transliteration. However, older ASCII fonts such as Leedsbit PaliTranslit, Times_Norman, Times_CSX+, Skt Times, Vri RomanPali CN/CB etc., are not recommendable, they are deprecated, since they are not compatible with one another, and are technically out of date. Instead, fonts based on the Unicode standard are recommended. However, not all Unicode fonts contain the necessary characters. To properly display all the diacritic marks used for romanized Pali (or for that matter, Sanskrit), a Unicode font must contain the following character ranges: Basic Latin: U+0000 – U+007F Latin-1 Supplement: U+0080 – U+00FF Latin Extended-A: U+0100 – U+017F Latin Extended-B: U+0180 – U+024F Latin Extended Additional: U+1E00 – U+1EFF Some Unicode fonts freely available for typesetting Romanized Pali are as follows: The Pali Text Society recommends VU-Times and Gandhari Unicode for Windows and Linux Computers. The Tibetan