When computers first started out, the only characters they understood were ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which is the basic Latin (i.e. English) alphabet and things like .,;-() and so on.

These were a maximum of 127 characters which by that time's encoding fit into 7 bit.

After that we went to 8 bit, which is now the common understanding of what a byte is.

With 8 bits (1 byte) you can encode 255 different characters and with it came the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) code table which in turn contains a variety of "foreign" (to Americans) characters, such as the German umlauts ö, ä and ü as well as the Eszett ß (which is not the Greek Beta β  ).

An overview can be found here.

Of course technology marches on and other languages needed to be represented as well which is when ultimately UTF-8 came into play which is today's standard for character encoding and which can represent Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Thai and whatnot.

Sadly, DVD Profilers codebase is stuck in the ANSI age which means you get certain (Western European) characters but for example you fail with characters that are exclusive to e.g. the Turkish language.

For example you are lucky with many Turkish letters because our somewhat infamous example François works because the ç is part of the French alphabet and Döner works because ö is part of the German alphabet, but the ş is only in Turkic language family

Addendum: The reason why the ş works in the forums is because the web server delivers this page as UTF-8. That's why you can also post the Japanese kanji for tree: 木

Well, a lot to read not about the question but interesting info. So maybe if anytime a new version of the profiler changes from ANSI to the next step, then we might get "all" of the other letters. I was just confused about.... but if I think about the HUGE load of work to change all the actual "wrong" characters it looks scaring.... :-)

Back to the original question: names, be it first names or surnames or both, can have accented characters in the language native to the person of that name. It is vital for a correct pronunciation: with "Francois" one would say "Frankois" (incrrect), whereas "François" would sound "Fransois" (correct).

However, DVDprofiler and its owner/designer/software developer are rooted in the USA, where a form of English is standard (*) — meaning no accented letters bar in very few imported words. As a result, it was decreed that only the not-accented alphabet was to be used for names. This was fiercely debated in the past by contributors, because it is disrespectful to persons with accented names, some forum threads on this you should be able to find, but in the end the owner (Invelos) is the boss. So we have to live with it.
This is also why with new contributions, the program tries to auto-correct with the removal of accents.

So this is what you'll find when you download a profile from the central database. Luckily enough, you can alter the spelling to its correct form locally and if you'll lock the cast/crew/titles where it occurs it'll be safe against future changes.

Also, even though this non-accented character decree exists, there is the (possibly even stronger) rule of adhering meticulously to the spelling used in the film credits itself. And a lot of contributors adhere to this, and as it was done this way in the past, which is why there are many such accented names in the central database. There are many debates in the "contribution" forum when a name should flip between the accented or non-accented form...

(*) meaning there are marked differences in pronunciation with respect to standard English (=U.K. English) apart from using different words for the same thing ("hood" vs. "bonnet" anyone  , etc ), different "slang" and so on. No disrespect intended to either variant.