Ah, thanks, now I get it. Buttons are not really a solution, though. Often every second character in a word is a special character, and switching from keyboard to mouse would be too tiresome in the long run. A colleague once wrote a Javascript for such purposes - you could enter special characters by keeping CTRL down and pressing some key. Problem was: it only worked with Internet Explorer, and the special characters were always added at the beginning of the input field or textarea, not where you needed them.

Another option is to just think of an otherwise unused character, like #, define special characters as combination of e.g. "a" and "#", and convert these strings into numeric HTML entities when adding, modifying or searching for records. At the moment this seems the simplest.

Anyway, thanks for your input.
kellner