maybe you can't type them in directly but just copy what you just written here and paste into Font SOP Text parm if your font supports the characters, Font SOP will display them correctly
and on top of that you can always use ascii syntax like \244
Oh wow I didn't know that, cheers Tamte! Recently for a job I had to have the swedish characters “å ä ö”, and what I did was to build them myself.. This saves time! Thanks.
Another way is to open the edit string window (either RMB-> Expression -> Edit String or Alt+e) and click on External Editor. Here in your system's default text editor you can write your text with all the characters you need, and they should come back to Houdini just fine.