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I have a general question about "non-standard" characters. Occasionally clues lead to words that include letters that are not commonly used in English. On rare occasions, these letters are checked and are in the correct position in both across and down clues. What is the general consensus on the treatment of these - do solvers generally use the closest "standard" English character or the non-standard equivalent?

As you will have guessed the question arose in connection with this puzzle but I have wondered about the general point for some time.

Apologies if this post is a bit oblique but I'm trying not to give too much away despite the passage of nearly a week.

It looks like the thread has now gone cold, kitsune - but as the last person to comment (and because I think it's an interesting question) I'll chip in again.
I spotted that possibility but didn't enter the mark - the convention is usually to ignore accents (although setters often instruct us to do so, and that isn't the case here). Similarly, we usually enter everything in caps (and I've seen French people actually wince at the sight of it), so we have our own quirky English ways of doing things, unless instructed otherwise.
I remember a Sabre puzzle that had a single Cyrillic character in the solution - but this was hinted at in the clue for that particular answer (although not very well, according to some of us}. Similarly, we've been told to use lower-case letters and all manner of odd characters. So, my answer to the problem is to ignore any 'extras' unless requested - but I don't submit my solutions (and I rarely even look at a solution published so long after the event).

Thank you, drxx. That is also my approach but I was asking because this one worked so neatly. On to the next!