\accent command; there are good reasons for this, but it means
that quality typesetting in non-English languages can be difficult.
For TeX macro packages, you can avoiding the effect by using an
appropriately encoded font (for example, a Cork-encoded font — see
the EC fonts) which contains accented
letters as single glyphs. LaTeX users can achieve this end simply
by adding the command
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
to the preamble of their document. Other encodings (notably
LY1, once promoted by Y&Y inc) may be used
in place of T1. Indeed, most current 8-bit TeX font
encodings will ‘work’ with the relevant sets of hyphenation patterns.
One might hope that, with the many aspirant successors to TeX such
as
Omega, LuaTeX and
ExTeX,
all of which base their operations on Unicode, that the whole basis of
encodings will change.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=hyphenaccents