For what it's worth: I'm still using 4.015 but plan to upgrade to 4.017; but I don't expect problems arising from which ASCII values my accented characters use, because when I switched from Xy3 I never took the trouble to learn how to produce accented characters by the "dead-key" method: so I've always used the lowest ASCII value available for each one. However, if I did have a mix of high-ASCII and even-higher-ASCII characters in files on my hard drive, I'd have thought they could be regularized by writing a simple program, to be run whenever an old file is re-opened. If the lowest values are preferred, the program would just globally convert (e.g.) ASCII 798 to ASCII 130, ASCII 783 to ASCII 129, etc. If (for whatever reason) you prefer the highest ASCII value for each character, write the same program in reverse. No? Incidentally, I use all the standard (i.e. German, French, Italian; occasionally Spanish) accented letters -- capital as well as lowercase -- with some frequency. I couldn't think up a convenient (and rememberable) system using Ctrl+letter or the like for this purpose. So I've turned F11 and F12 into extra function keys, by creating two extra "tables" in the .KBD file. Then I noticed that if you draw a kind of V-shaped grid on the keyboard -- with the same finger moving up and left on the left hand, up and right on the right hand -- each sloping "column" under a single finger includes only one vowel. I put all the circumflexed letters on the top row of the keyboard, umlaut/diaresis on the 2nd row, acute on the 3rd row, and grave on the bottom row. Easier to do than to describe: e+circum = F11+3, o+umlaut = F11+o, a+acute = F11+a, i+grave = F11+n. (I had to cheat on two non-vowel foreign characters: c+cedilla, for which I use F11+v, and German "eszett" [also called "sharp s"], for which I use F11+s. I've never done enough Spanish to bother to find a home for n+tilde.) The system has two advantages: It's easy to remember where an accented letter is, even if you haven't typed anything in Italian for months. And creating the F11 and F12 tables has allowed me to put a lot of other extra characters (like ASCII 20 and 21) on the keyboard where I can find them when, just occasionally, I need them. Incidentally, F11 and F12 can still be used for their default roles as self-sufficient keys (F11 expands triangles etc., F12 recalls deletes), since they don't perform those roles until struck *and released*: if you hit F11 and hold it down, it waits for another key to be struck and then performs as specified in the added F11 table in the .KBD file. Cheers, Eric Van Tassel