HTML allows you to use any character in the ISO Latin1 character set (which is the set of characters used by X-windows, and is a subset of that used by Microsoft Windows). These characters consist mostly of the accented vowels used by Western European languages. There are a few additional glyphs, such as the copyright symbol.
You can copy and paste characters from the list of special characters into your page.
If you are using UNIX, you can also insert special characters by choosing
Element
Special
Characters. The window lists all latin1 characters. Double click
on one and it will be inserted into your text. On the right side are
two buttons for inserting en and em dashes (which are not Latin 1 characters
but which are part of the HTML character set).