>>If you can type them you can use them. There are only six special characters and they have predefined entities :
>>" & quot;
>>& & amp;
>>' & apos;
>>< & lt;
>>> & gt;
>
>I still haven't decided yet on the best route for this as I have so many French characters and I also need to support more than that.
>
>If I changed from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1, this may create unexpected situations. I have seen some pretty weird concerns about that:
>
>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1259409/utf-8-or-iso-8859-1-in-xml
>
>If I encode at a general level special branches of the Xml, by the use of System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode, this will encode the less than and greater than signs of each tag. So, this will result that I will not be able to see that branch of the Xml in a Xml format but as a big string.

Don't you have a French keyboard ?