One thing that bugs me.

Yep, there's only one. Well... anyways, I hate how hard it is to type special characters on computers, especially Windows. I haven't used Macs regularly since OS X came out, so I can't speak for that operating system, but Windows straight sucks when it comes to "true" quotes (left and right curl different ways), en- and emdashes (dashes of different lengths), a real apostrophe (it's not a vertical line), accented characters, circumflexes, tildes, umlauts, ellipses, daggers, and all the rest. One can hardly carry on a chat in Elvish without these characters, or even French, German, or nearly any other non-English language. Forget about Czech/Magyar or Swedish/Norse/Icelandic. And then there are whole different alphabets like Cyrillic and Cantonese, but that's another story for another day.

I know there is the ALT+XXXX approach where X=some number, but that means I have to keep a chart by my computer. In HTML there's the same ungainly idea with the &#XXXX thing. And there's Unicode, which is a cool means for fonts to actually have and display a large set of characters, but doesn't help the typist indicate the appropriate characters in the first place with an American or British keyboard. Maybe this already exists, but i suggest a little sidebar you can load where you can click any of these special characters and they will be instantly inserted into whatever text field has the focus. There are things like Key Caps that do this in a roundabout way, bu they are not quite friendly enough to use regularly. The other possibility is a keyboard that gets rid of dumb keys, like the Windows key, "scroll lock," "num lock," the existing tilde/grave key, and all the other garbage keys and replace them with a neat column of special inflection mark, say on the leftmost side of the keyboard where some dumb companies put application or media-control keys that don't work. Then, you just press that character, say an umlaut, then press your vowel on the normal part of the keyboard, and out pops the correct letter. No Ctrl or Alt+anything. Is this too simple for it to happen?

I like to use accents and related special characters when I can, and it makes a document more professional and beautiful to see them used correctly–so why is it so hard to do the right thing?

If anyone has suggestions that might make my life easier in this regard I'd welcome them. Thanks.