Editing Diacritic (section)

==Generation with computers==
{{main|Unicode input}}
[[File:Germanic umlaut on keyboard.jpg|thumb|German keyboard with umlaut letters]]
Modern computer technology was developed mostly in countries that speak Western European languages (particularly English), and many early binary encodings were developed with a bias favoring English{{mdash}}a language written without diacritical marks. With [[computer memory]] and [[computer storage]] at premium, early [[character set]]s were limited to the Latin alphabet, the ten digits and a few punctuation marks and conventional symbols.  The American Standard Code for Information Interchange ([[ASCII]]), first published in 1963, encoded just 95 printable characters. It included just four free-standing diacritics{{mdash}}acute, grave, circumflex and tilde{{mdash}}which were to be used by backspacing and overprinting the base letter. The [[ISO/IEC 646]] standard (1967) defined national variations that replace some American graphemes with [[precomposed character]]s (such as {{angbr|é}}, {{angbr|è}} and {{angbr|ë}}), according to language{{mdash}}but remained limited to 95 printable characters.

[[Unicode]] was conceived to solve this problem by assigning every known character its own code; if this code is known, most modern computer systems provide a [[Unicode#Input methods|method to input it]]. For historical reasons, almost all the letter-with-accent combinations used in European languages were given unique [[code point]]s and these are called [[precomposed character]]s. For other languages, it is usually necessary to use a [[combining character]] diacritic together with the desired base letter. Unfortunately, even as of 2024, many applications and web browsers remain unable to operate the combining diacritic concept properly.
 
Depending on the [[keyboard layout]] and [[keyboard mapping]], it is more or less easy to enter letters with diacritics on computers and typewriters. Keyboards used in countries where letters with diacritics are the norm, have keys engraved with the relevant symbols. In other cases, such as when the [[US international]] or [[UK extended]] mappings are used, the accented letter is created by first pressing the key with the diacritic mark, followed by the letter to place it on. This method is known as the [[dead key]] technique, as it produces no output of its own but modifies the output of the key pressed after it.