That which is foreign.

[tracerj]

I discovered a new annoyance yesterday. It started with a small joy, as these things often do.

For the Thirteen Ribbons source files, I have been keeping the text to 7-bit clean ASCII. The reason for this was solely because of FurAffinity, which didn't take the codepage into account at all and didn't even bother converting ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8

Comments

[baxil]

Various suggestions, in order of decreasing feasibility/workflow integration:

• Use jEdit's macro feature to your benefit. If it lets you map macros to keystroke combinations, then look up the accents you need, make macros that insert one of them at the current character position, and then map them to something like Alt+Shift+O or Ctrl+Alt+A.
  
• Use poor man's macros. Write "Flosadóttir" as "Flosado#ttir" or something similar; before exporting the story, do a search-replace with o# for ó.
  
• Use the clipboard to your benefit. Write with a browser window open in the background to http://copypastecharacter.com, alt-tab to it and click on the accented character that you need every time you get to one, and then alt-tab back to jEdit and paste.
  
• Memorize all the codes you need, type them in every time, and curse technology under your breath.
  
• Buy (and write your stories on) a Mac, as per shatterstripes' comment. Simplest but costly.

Edited to add: Wikipedia's AltGr article is interesting reading; it may not help you accomplish what you want, but at least it may help you understand the principles.