title: How to handle special characters in markdown?
body: <p>I am just discovering Markdown and MultiMarkdown and I am loving it so far. However, special characters are not properly escaped when exporting to HTML and come out as garbage in the browser. </p>
  
  <p>Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>How does Markdown handle special characters?
  ============================================
  
  For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>is converted to</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;h1 id="howdoesmarkdownhandlespecialcharacters"&gt;How does Markdown handle special characters?&lt;/h1&gt;
  
  &lt;p&gt;For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Since I have to write in German a lot, entering the escape sequences by hand is not an option. How can I get HTML output with properly escaped special characters?</p>