Punctuation is not indexed, but future versions might use it for phrasal search. Searching a word with a comma will be unsuccessful because the comma is used as any other character together with other punctuation marks.
A dash "-" is a common character, except placed in the beginning of a word that is not quoted (boolean search). Words with a dash can be searched and indexed. Alkaline can search and index numbers and words with digits.
Accentuated characters, such as in French, are translated into respective variants (é to e, à to a, etc.) at both search and index. Multilingual servers using Alkaline might have this feature removed to enable searching of Russian text for example.