\
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