Time for action – experimenting with accents

We will write some words having letters with accents in Portuguese and in French.

1. Create a new document:

   \documentclass{article}
   \begin{document}
   N\~{a}o compreendo. H\'{a} aqui algu\'{e}mque fale ingl\^{e}s?
   
   Comment \c{c}a va? O\`{u} se trouve l'a\'{e}roport?
   \end{document}

2. Typeset to see the generated accents:

   

What just happened?

LaTeX provides some special commands to produce a variety of accents. They may be combined with any letter. Such a command consists of a backslash followed by one character. The accent will be put above or below the letter that has to follow in curly braces. The following table will list these commands and their effect:

Using special characters directly in the editor

It might be a bit cumbersome to use those accent commands. There's a package that extends LaTeX basic capabilities. It allows you to enter at least some commonly used accented and other special characters directly.