[Tex/LaTex] Are there any downsides to using macros to avoid typing accents

Question

As a native English speaker, I am not used to many words with accents on them, so I find it somewhat difficult to keep the various accents straight in my head, and moreso to also remember the TeX commands for all of them.

Additionally, I am very lazy.

Thus, I have recently begun to use macros for accented words that commonly come up in my writing, thereby absolving me of the responsibility of remembering which accents the word takes and how to type them. This also ensures that I am consistent: I don't need to worry about whether I mistyped the accent in a single occurrence of the word, which would be tough to spot.

Here are some examples:

\newcommand{\Poincare}{Poincar\'e}
\newcommand{\adele}{adel\`e}
\newcommand{\Cech}{\v{C}ech}
\newcommand{\Erdos}{Erd\H{o}s}

I've described what I see as the benefits of doing this. My question is, is this a "best practice"?
Or at least an "okay practice"? What are the downsides?

One that I realized recently is that, of course, this will produce collisions between my desired definitions for words that are the same up to accents. For example, in mathematics we use the words French words étale and étalé (see here and here), and they would both want to be the definition of the macro \etale. Now, the former is used much more than the latter, so I would grant it the macro to it, but that leaves the question of how to appropriately make a command for the latter. A starred version, maybe? A macro \etalee? Or, should I give up and actually remember how to accent things?

Answer 1

It's very commendable trying to get accents right. A person's name should always be spelled in the original way, if the alphabet is the same. For original names using a different script, any internationally recognized transliteration system can be used.

It's sometimes hard to realize that Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev or Tschebyscheff is one and the same person, that is Pafnuty Chebyshev (in a widely used transliteration system) or Pafnutij Čebyšev (in another system). (In Russian, with cyrillic alphabet, the name is Пафнутий Чебышев.)

Writing "Poincare", "Cech" or "Erdos" is quite common, but wrong. And it's not difficult to use the correct spellings: "Poincaré", "Čech" and "Erdős". (Correctly pronouncing the names is another matter.)

For your problem of not remembering the accents, using macros can be a solution. Note how I solve the "étale–étalé" problem with a *-variant.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage{xspace}

\newcommand{\Poincare}{Poincar\'e\xspace}
\newcommand{\adele}{ad\`ele\xspace}
\newcommand{\Cech}{\v{C}ech\xspace}
\newcommand{\Erdos}{Erd\H{o}s\xspace}
\makeatletter
\newcommand{\etale}{\'etal\@ifstar{\'e}{e\xspace}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\Poincare and \Erdos went to an \etale* party at \Cech's
with an \adele and an \etale as gifts. \Cech was happy.

Poincaré and Erdős went to an étalé party at Čech's
with an adèle and an étale as gifts. Čech was happy.
\end{document}