Bonjour, garçon!  Here ees my résumé!

I mean, if you’re going to act cosmopolitan… at least look cosmopolitan!

Hold down the Alt key, punch in a few numbers on the keyboard, release the Alt key… et voilà!  Zee accent mark pops onto zee page like zee magic!

(Now how do I get reed of thees outRAgeous accENT?!)
 

Download this excellent program with the adorable name of Characteristica.  It’s just a quick install.

Run the program, flip the drop-down menu at the top to ‘Arial’.

Find your custom character(s).  If you want to copy it to memory and use Ctrl-V to punch it in later on, double-click on it to put it into the queue.  When you’re ready to go back to the editor, click on the ‘Copy all…’ button, on the upper-right-left.

Swing around to the editor and paste with Ctrl-V.

To do the keyboard routine, note the ‘Keys’ line above the box on the right.  Note the four numbers.  In the editor, you’d hold down the Alt key, punch those four numbers in, then release the Alt key.

The only hitch is that they’re composed of four numbers, so they’re a little hard to keep memorized over time if you don’t use them very often.  The only two I know by heart are Alt-0233 for the

é con accénto

and Alt-0151 for — the — horizontal bar.  You can always scribble them down on a post-it and stick it somewhere handy.

If you were typing text in a word processing program or a graphics program like Photoshop and wanted to include a font from a different fontset, like ‘Symbol’, you’d first open Character Map and set the drop-down menu to ‘Symbol’, then find your custom font and either copy it to memory or remember the four ALT numbers, then swing around to the program, set the fonts to ‘Symbol’, punch it in, then switch back to your normal fonts.