In article ,
Colin Youngs writes:
My keyboard is equipped for French and German so I use the accents or umlaut
when typing words or place names in those languages. I don't know if they
always show up correctly on other posters' PCs.

It will depend on the character set that they have installed, and also
on whether their news server handles 8-bit characters correctly (most do
these days). Only ASCII characters 0-127 are guaranteed to be seen
correctly by absolutely everybody. However in practice most people
should see them all right.

I have no Spanish tilde
and so cannot type something like "el niño" directly. In that situation, I
look the word up on a website and copy-and-paste it from there.

That's a round about way of doing it. There's probably a way of getting
it using the Alt Gr key followed by the numbers that correspond to its
ASCII numeric equivalent. Or look under Programs Accessories System
Tools Character Map, where you should be able to find it.
--
John Hall
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early
for anything you want to do."
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)