about those odd characters and foreign letters...on a PC..(not on a MAC) all you have to do is hold down the 'alt' key while typing numeric combination..

thus 'alt 0131' = ƒ, and 'alt 0223' = ß, and 'alt 0176' = °

somewhere in the Windows bowels is the 'character map' which has the complete list..(I have several font listing programs which find 'em for me)

MAC can do something similar, but I don't know exactly how