For accented letters in Latin-alphabet languages, use the
accented keys from your keyboard.
If you can’t see any (eg United
States (US) and UK keyboards),
they are probably available using the
AltGr key or some other control key
combination: see the documentation which came with your
operating system.
If you really don’t have any, you can use your
computer’s or editor’s character map to pick them from a
pop-up window (may be under the
menu).
If you can’t find the right combination of keystrokes
to generate the characters you want, or you simply can’t
generate those characters from your keyboard, use Table 1.3 below.
For language-specific hyphenation and cultural adaptation
(including the correct language headings for all the parts of
your document) use the babel or
polyglossia packages (see
§ 1.10.6 below).
For non-Latin typefaces you will also need the appropriate
package for the language and the fonts which actually contain
the characters (see § 6.2 below).
Failing all this, if you don’t have accented letter keys
on your keyboard, or you can’t find the codes to type, or if
you need additional accents or symbols which are not in any of
the keyboard tables, you can use the symbolic notation in
Table 1.3 below. In fact this can be used to put
any accent over any letter (for example, Welsh users can get a
ŵ with \^w), even for combinations
which only rarely exist in any language: if you particularly
want a g̃, for example, you can have one with the
command \~g.
Table 1.3: Symbolic notation for Latin-alphabet accents
| Accent | Example | Characters to type |
| Acute (fada) | é | \'e |
| Grave | è | \`e |
| Circumflex | ê | \^e |
| Umlaut or diæresis | ë | \"e |
| Tilde | ñ | \~n |
| Macron | ō | \=o |
| Bar-under | o | \b o |
| Dot-over (séıṁıú) | ṁ | \.m |
| Dot-under | ṣ | \d s |
| Breve | ŭ | \u u |
| Háček (caron) | ň | \v n |
| Long umlaut | ő | \H o |
| Tie-after | o͡o | \t oo |
| Cedilla | ç, Ç | \c c, \c
C |
| O-E ligature | œ, Œ | \oe,
\OE |
| A-E ligature | æ, Æ | \ae,
\AE |
| A-ring | å, Å | \aa,
\AA |
| O-slash | ø, Ø | \o,
\O |
| Soft-l | ł, Ł | \l,
\L |
| Ess-zet (scharfes-s) | ß | \ss |
Before the days of keyboards and screens with their own
real accented characters, the symbolic notation in Table 1.3 above was the only
way to get accents, so you may come across a lot of older
documents (and users!) using this method all the time: it does
have the advantage in portability that the LATEX file
remains plain ASCII, which will work on
all machines everywhere, regardless of their internal
encoding, and even with very old TEX
installations.
Irish and Turkish dotless-ı can be done with the
special command \i, so an í (which is
normally typed with í) may require
\'\i{} if you need to type it in the long
format — remembering that dummy pair of curly braces if
there is no punctuation, because of the rule that LATEX
control sequences which end in a letter always absorb any
following space (see the note ‘Three rules for spacing in LATEX documents’ above). So what you
see as Rí Teaṁraċ
(‘King of Tara’) when typeset would have to be
R\'\i\ Tea\.mra\.c when typed in full
(there are not usually any dedicated keyboard keys for the
dotless-ı or for aspirated or lenited characters). A
similar rule applies to dotless-ȷ and to uppercase Í.
