\accent (LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual (November 2018))

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#### 23.5.1 `\accent`

Synopsis:

    \accentnumber character

A TeX primitive command used to generate accented characters from accent marks and letters. The accent mark is selected by number, a numeric argument, followed by a space and then a character argument constructs the accented character in the current font.

These are accented ‘`e`’ characters.

    \accent18 e
    \accent20 e
    \accent21 e
    \accent22 e
    \accent23 e

The first is a grave, the second is breve, etc.

The position of the accent is determined by the font designer and so the outcome of `\accent` use may differ between fonts. In LaTeX it is desirable to have glyphs for accented characters rather than building them using `\accent`. Using glyphs that already contain the accented characters (as in T1 encoding) allows correct hyphenation whereas `\accent` disables hyphenation (specifically with OT1 font encoding where accented glyphs are absent).

There can be an optional font change between number and character. Note also that that this command sets the `\spacefactor` to 1000 (see \spacefactor).

An unavoidable characteristic of some Cyrillic letters and the majority of accented Cyrillic letters is that they must be assembled from multiple elements (accents, modifiers, etc.) while `\accent` provides for a single accent mark and a single letter combination. There are also cases where accents must appear between letters that \accent does not support. Still other cases exist where the letters I and J have dots above their lowercase counterparts that conflict with dotted accent marks. The use of `\accent` in these cases will not work as it cannot analyze upper/lower case.

Unofficial LaTeX2e reference manual