italics and accented vowels in prelims

[sisbra]

Describe the bug
In the prelims I cannot write in italics using text as in Markdown. \textit{} does not work either. Moreover, accented vowels (e.g. è, ì) are not allowed and the file is not printed. Thanks for the help.

[ismayc]

Sorry, the prelims are really tricky to deal with whenever special characters are added. I'd love some support for folks in the community on fixing this, but I'm not sure how at this point.