How to type special/accented letters in LaTeX?

Question

How to type these special letters from European languages in latex? ä, é, and L'?

Answer 1

Save your file as UTF-8 and put

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern} % load a font with all the characters

in your preamble.

Then you can just type the characters normally into your source file.

Or, use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX which accepts UTF-8 input natively. In that case you need to add

\usepackage{fontspec}

to your preamble.

If your text editor doesn't support UTF-8 encoded files, you should probably get another editor. But if you're stuck with one, you can also use:

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} % for PCs
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc} % for Macs

and save the files in the default encoding for your machine.

Answer 2

You can type texdoc lshort in a command line (Command Prompt on Windows, Terminal on Linux/Mac OS X). Then have a look at Table 2.2 in Section 2.4.8. I'll quote it for you here.

Answer 3

You can use Detexify. Just draw your symbol, and it will figure out what you need to type! Much easier than plowing through endless symbol tables :).