Newcommand with accents

Question

I would like to create a command to automatically generate accented letters like è or é.

I tried:

\newcommand{\ar}[1]{\´#1}
\newcommand{\al}[1]{\`#1}

\ar{e}
\al{e}

but the result was "Undefined sequence".

Anyone know how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

I think you may have a non-ascii character, ´, in the first \newcommand; hence, TeX doesn't recognize the control sequence \´ and generates an error message. Just use an ordinary apostrophe instead: \'.

The following modified form of your code should do the job for you:

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\ar}[1]{\'{#1}}
\newcommand{\al}[1]{\`{#1}}
\begin{document}
\ar{e}
\al{e}
\end{document}​