When you save the page, your browser can have already done some interpretation! You should use wget to be sure that what you see is what I sent. What happens if you save the file and then load it up again in firefox?

(Let me know if you spot one (innocent bystander, that is).)

I could teach it the special ones, I suppose, though, but it's much easier to have a generic method that works for every letter with a particular accent or font. It depends how much people will use it as to how much effort I put in!

(Innocent bystanders should be arrested for their rarity value)

(And to innocent bystanders shocked by my harsh language: I know Andrew, and expect him to not take “it sucks” personally when it comes from me. It's not intended in a bad way.)

PS. Using o with combining double acute, as in ő (test: ő) seems to work fine in firefox here on meta. So why doesn't it work when served by your little app? Strange.

Regarding the script, since it was a 10minute hack, it only knows about those commands that I already know. So if there's something, like \H, that should be there but isn't, just let me know; preferably with what the corresponding unicode should be.

And @Andrew, your script sucks. It doesn't know about \H.

Huh? It works for me.

The compose key is an ancient device from the days of yore. Originally, the "backspace" key on a typewriter allowed you to overtype symbols on top of other symbols. When keyboards first came around (before that they used punchcards with keypunches [which look like keyboards that punch cards]), they realized that backspace was useful to clear a previous character, so they moved the old functionality of overtyping to the compose key. I believe that TECO was the first text editor to make use of this feature. What this lets you do is compose two (or more) keys in a row to produce a special character. Now, there are a lot of keys on a keyboard, so you can imagine how many characters you have direct access to.

However, most personal computers did not support this feature. I don't know why, I mean it's just a single extra key that vastly increases functionality. Anyway, the point is that there is software that lets you map a key to the compose key, write your own composition sequences, etc. This has been around on Linux for a while (I think it's been an optional setting in emacs since the dawn of time, since emacs is/was based on TECO). As you might imagine, for people who are used to LaTeX, using a compose key is wonderful, because it gives you a lot of the convenient stuff you have in LaTeX but you can use it anywhere and it doesn't need to compile.

By default, I do not think that there is a compose sequence for ő, but adding it is as simple as finding the unicode and adding it to the configuration file. For example, a good place to put that letter without moving the ö would be to send it to (" + 0) rather than (" + o). In principle, any unicode character can be added with no trouble at all. For example, compose (o + o) = ∞. Note that when pressing the keys, they need not both be depressed at once, but can be composed sequentially.

From what I know about macs (very little, to be honest), it seems like there should be an easy way to port the relevant stuff from Linux, but I'm not a programmer, so I couldn't tell you.

Anyway, the whole beauty here is that I can type special characters without moving my hands from the keyboard. The novelty has not yet worn off.

If we included this in the FAQ under "how can I type accented characters?", it seems like this should become a non-issue.

However, I do agree with Andrew that using HTML entities or unicode codes is precisely the wrong thing to be doing. It seems clear to me that the system in LaTeX was designed to have the same functionality as the compose key (which stopped being standard on pc keyboards ages ago).

(There aren't as many HTML entities as there are MathML entities. For example, &Ccharon; (test: &Ccharon;) doesn't get understood but Č (test: Č) does; but who can remember that code?)

I still support the feature request though. I'd rather be able to type it in markdown than using a resident program intercepting keys left and right.

On the Mac, for rarely used characters you always have the option of picking characters from a character palette. There you can find all sorts of mathematical symbols, including ⋘ ⋙ ⧑ ⧒ which I cannot recall ever seeing in mathematical texts. Plus, you can make your own keyboard layout using a third party application like Ukelele.

If you are using X (under Linux, say), you are actually much better off AFAICS: you can then use the us-intl layout which sets up the dead keys, but you also get the Compose key from you can, hmm, compose all sort of weird characters: ¶«»®©™đĐ₡₦¢♭♮§ by typing Compose followed by two keys.

This is the correct solution to your problem in this millenium. (La)TeX's was a very good solution 30 years ago, when Unicode and UTF-8 were non-existent, and 640K were enough for everyone.