How to handle special characters in markdown?

Question

I am just discovering Markdown and MultiMarkdown and I am loving it so far. However, special characters are not properly escaped when exporting to HTML and come out as garbage in the browser.

Example:

How does Markdown handle special characters?
============================================

For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.

is converted to

<h1 id="howdoesmarkdownhandlespecialcharacters">How does Markdown handle special characters?</h1>

<p>For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.</p>

Since I have to write in German a lot, entering the escape sequences by hand is not an option. How can I get HTML output with properly escaped special characters?

Answer 1

I do not know if this scenario apply to you, but here goes:

I have the same need regarding the Norwegian letters 'æ', 'ø' and 'å'. I use FireFox and the add-on 'Markdown Viewer' to view markdown documents.

Viewing a Norwegian document in Markdown Viewer will render garbled letters if the document is saved in the ordinary manner.

Saving the document using western (windows 1252) encoding renders the text just fine (I also tried with your German letters).

Answer 2

As far as I know, this is not possible (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). I have recently been generating documentation in Doxygen using Markdown syntax and have had to replace all ° symbols with °, which is a shame as it goes against the philosophy of Markdown, which is to make the text files as readable as the generated output.