[OS X TeX] Diacritic accents directly in source file

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Hello fellow listers, what I have here is a TeX related question, 
oriented (but not exclusively) to those who use more than just english 
in their texts. I am looking for a way to make my life easy when I type 
input text in a spanish LaTeX source file, as I have to write many words 
with accents. Given my limited TeX knowledge the only way I can achieve 
a nicely looking accented letter like é in the output is by typing \'e 
in the source code but, as any one who uses romance languages surely 
knows, this becomes a major nuisance fast. What I would like to do is to 
be able to just type é in the source file in order to get the proper 
accented letter in the output, but all the methods I've tried so far 
leave me with no positive results. In the preamble of my file I have:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage{isolatin1}
\usepackage{indentfirst}
\usepackage{amsmath}

	But none of them get me what I want. The way I understand it is: 
the [T1]{fontenc} package will serve me to get proper hyphenation in 
accented letters and other non standard characters; [spanish]{babel} 
will put spanish spelled titles like "Resumen" instead of "Abstract"; 
{isolatin1}, the one I was told would save my day, has turned difficult 
for me to figure out. If, with all packages loaded, I type \'e in the 
source file I get a properly accented e (é) in the output, but if I type 
é directly I get a capital O with a tilde (~, or so it seems) on top of 
it. Commenting out the isolatin1 package while loading the others 
produces no difference in the output, the same accented O appears. 
Turning [T1]{fontenc} off and {isolatin1} on is transparent to \'e but 
blows my é into nothingness in the output (nothing appears, not even the 
accented O). Turning both of yields the same result, nothing is printed 
for é. Testing combinations with [spanish]{babel} commented out is not 
possible because LaTeX reports various different errors due to the 
absence of that package and I cannot justify troubleshooting those with 
the excuse of finding a procedure that will help me save time in the 
future.

	So, after all my sterile tests, I thought I could seek advice here 
from those of you who have had to deal with this before. Is there 
something that helps LaTeX understand code written with non standard 
english characters? The only useful thing I've seen about the isolatin1 
package is that it lets me write \'i instead of \'{\i} to get a properly 
accented í (without it \'i produces an i with its regular dot and an 
accent on top of it). For the sake of formality, I have Mac OS X 10.1.5 
and I'm writing my files with an american keyboard and layout, even 
though I don't think that has any bearing on the results.

	Any one, please...? Thank you all in advance for your time and 
advice. Sincerely,...


		Juan.


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