In an earlier post I presented a workaround for entering non-native language diacritics (like the grave accent in à la carte) by using InDesign’s built-in spellchecker, which can add them for you. It’s a slick solution, but it requires some set-up — you have to enter a word incorrectly and have InDesign correct it.

I recently learned of a better way to insert any difficult glyph into the text flow, correctly, on the fly: Peter Kahrel’s compose.jsx script for Adobe InDesign (Mac/Windows, CS2/CS3, donationware — download instructions are at the end).