Regarding how to insert accent marks - I cheated. I usually compose my messages using Microsoft Word, then I cut and paste to the Mudcat thread. I do this for a several reasons. One, I am a compulsive perfectionist and I like to run my spell-checker before posting anything. (Frankly, I wish more mudcatters would do this.) Two, if I want to interrupt my composing to look something up on the Internet, I can do it without worrying about losing what I have written so far. Three, I can save my Microsoft Word documents with or without posting to Mudcat.

Then the question becomes, how do you insert special characters into a Microsoft Word document?

There are several ways: (1) Use Insert/Symbol, click on the character you want, then click Insert. (2) Memorize (or keep a cheat sheet that tells you) the shortcut keys for the characters you want. You can find out what shortcut keys you need by using Insert/Symbol, clicking on the character you want, and reading the information from the bottom of the menu. It tells me that the shortcut for é is "Ctrl+',E" which means, "Hold down the CTRL key while pressing first the apostrophe and then the E". (3) You can memorize (or find a cheat sheet that tells you) the ASCII code for the letter you want. The ASCII code for é is 130, so Microsoft Word lets you insert it by holding down the ALT key while typing the three numeric digits 130. However, it seems that some symbols don't have a 3-digit ASCII code. (4) You can just cut and paste from any document that already has the letter you want, including a web page.

Anyway, I found that the é character survived just fine when I cut and pasted my entire message from Word to Mudcat. This doesn't always work with other software. For example, the other day I wanted to send an e-mail message that contained the British pound sign (£). I found that when I cut and pasted from Word to Netscape Composition, it converted my pound sign to a question mark. Obviously, there are some things I haven't figured out yet.