Okay.. after some irritation i've discovered how to enter non-keyboard characters in Pidgin. Instead of the alt+___ that windows uses, it actually uses unicode (a cool thing), unfortunately, this means instead of the nice simple number things from before, i have to learn unicode :P (not a cool thing).
so now i have to hit:
ctrl+shift+u (but you can let go of the u) and it shows a little u with the underline like that.. then you enter the hex for the unicode value you want to display.
important ones to know!
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ä - 00E4 (alt+0228)
å - 00E5 (alt+0229)
ö - 00F6 (alt+0246)
ü - 00FC (alt+0252)
ß - 00DF (alt+0223)
ṹ - 1E79
Too bad most of them don't display!
http://www.unicodetables.com/-----
In other news! This dictionary is amazing and awesome!!
http://jisho.org/I highly recommend it to anyone with interest in japanese!
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Plot: Luau!