producing accented characters is to use the 'compose' key. This is a generic X method too.
What you do is hit the 'compose' key followed by two keys to make the accented character, e.g. for e acute you do:- Compose E ' (or you can do Compose ' E, doesn't matter)
However this does raise some other issues:-
You need to have a 'compose' key, this is a matter of setting up your keyboard map to assign 'compose' to some fairly easy key combination. On my Linux box at home I have it set to 'Shift Alt Gr', on my Sun box at work there is actually a Compose key.
Some applications may insist that you have the locale set correctly to show the accented characters, otherwise they just show a '?' for any character with a value above 127 because in the default ASCII character set they are undefined. On the system I'm using to send this I just have "export LC_ALL=en" in my .profile and this suffices to say that characters >127 are valid. However this is a bit of a blunt instrument and some systems may need more subtle setting of the locale variables to work well.
It's a bit of a black art and it may take you a while to get everything you want working properly but it can generally be done. (Having said that I still cant type accented characters from where I am just at the moment because I can't work out how to set up a compose key on the X server I'm using).