Daniel Ehrenberg wrote at last: See [[Wikipedia:Special characters]]. The "Entity" column in the table (with all the "&...;" stuff) shows how to create special characters using only ASCII input. Why is this a good idea? (I claim that it is on [[en:]].) Because some people have browsers that mangle anything else. (Anthere's browser famously mangles non-Latin-1 characters -- and no insult meant to you, Anthere, you're just a well known example -- and I have occasionally seen even Latin-1 but non-ASCII characters mangled by various anonymous editors.) In particular, "é" is "é". You would want to input the "é" directly on, say, [[fr:]]; how to do that depends on your browser, operating system, and keyboard. -- Toby