A diacritic or diacritical mark is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words.
Computers and other typing devices offer many different keyboard layouts for inputting data in different languages. The standard English keyboard layout is known as QWERTY. It was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to the Remington Typewriter Company in 1873.
For assistance with International keyboard codes, accents and diacritical marks check out the following blogging tools.
Accents » Windows » International Keyboard Codes
The International English Keyboard in Windows: see http://www.starr.net/is/type/intlchart.html
For Mac try http://www.macility.com/products/popcharx/
Create your own keyboard layout using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator
The shareware application NoteTab.com which has other useful features.
This detailed reference: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/index.html
Character entity references in HTML 4: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html
See also: HTML 4.01 Symbol Entities Reference
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Dave
March 22, 2008
I would strongly advise using the HTML entities rather than keyboard shortcuts. I’ve always done the latter, and twice now they’ve all been lost while exporting my blog. Some feed readers don’t display them correctly, either. So from now on I’m using HTML for all letters with diacritical marks.
timethief
March 22, 2008
Wow! I’m glad you posted and shared your experience.
Dave
March 27, 2008
Say, I just found – quite by accident – the solution for all those messed-up characters, at least for self-hosted WordPress bloggers: the Search and Replace plugin. Works very well. (I have a bunch of Spanish-language texts in my archives, hence my concern.)
timethief
March 27, 2008
Great find! Thanks for sharing. :-)