Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

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correctness) on lowercase vowels but it is optional in uppercase vowels. The letter 'u' may have a

dieresis (like the German umlaut), both in uppercase and lowercase forms.

Some punctuation signs are characteristic of the Spanish language. The opening question mark

and the opening exclamation sign look like the English question mark and exclamation sign ro 

tated 180 degrees. The English question mark and exclamation sign are referred to as closing

question mark and exclamation sign. The small underlined 'a' and 'o' are used mainly for ordinal

numbers, similar to the small 'th' in English ordinals.

5.2.2 Character Sets

UNE (Una Norma Espanola) is the National Standards Organization in Spain. UNE is a member

of the ISO and standards that have one to one correspondence are usually called by their ISO

number, rather than their UNE number.

ISO 8859 1, also known as ISO Latin 1, contains the characters required for Spanish.

5.2.3 Codesets

The codeset mostly used for Spanish is ISO 8859 1. The codepage Windows 1252 a.k.a. Win 

dows Latin 1 is a superset of ISO 8859 1 that adds some characters in the range 128 to 159. Other

codesets are Unicode, Macintosh Roman (codepage 1000), MS DOS Latin 1 (codepage 850) or less

frequently MS DOS Latin US (codepage 437) which contains accented lowercase characters but

not uppercase. Some additional Latin codesets are EBCDIC CP500 and CP 1026 (used in IBM

mainframes and terminal emulators), Adobe Standard (used as default for Postscript documents),

Nextstep Latin, HP Roman 8 (for HPUX and Laserjet resident printer fonts) and the Latin code 

page in OS/2. They are all stateless, 8 bit codepages (with the exception of Unicode that is 16 bit).

5.2.4 How These Codesets Are Used   Information for Programmers

In most cases it is safe to use ISO 8859 1 characters. Some exceptions are

  WWW browsers should recognize all codesets.

  Software which communicates with IBM mainframes, Macintosh, MS DOS, Nextstep, HPUX,

OS/2 should handle the corresponding encoding.

  File names for Joliet format CD ROM used for Windows is written in Unicode.

  Postscript interpreters should handle the Adobe Standard character set.

  Printer filters or drivers for HP printers should handle the Roman 8 character set if using

the internal fonts.