I just wanted to type a few ËÈØ kind of letters, but
I couldn't find the particular ones I was looking
for. I assume the Mac character map will also give me
the keyboard shortcut ?
Character Map = Character Palette. You get to it via Edit > Special Characters, or check its box in system prefs/international/input menu. No keyboard shortcuts are given, however. You can use Keyboard Viewer (check its box in system prefs/international/input menu) to see which key does what.
Some people like the program PopCharX.
Here's a chart of the shortcuts for diacritics:
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/diacritics.html