Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

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5.2.5 Columns

On console displays, each character occupies one column. Printed text can be equally spaced (one

column per character) or proportionally spaced (a character can occupy fractionally more or less

than a column, depending on its shape).

Note: Even when using Traditional Sorting, ch and ll occupy two columns. See the comment on

Traditional sorting in `Sorting' on the following page.

5.2.6 Writing Direction

Spanish is normally written in left to right lines arranged from top to bottom of the page. For

artistic purposes it might be written in top to bottom columns arranged left to right within the

page. This columnar arrangement would be expected only in graphic and charting programs (e.g.,

a drawing program, a spreadsheet graph or a page layout program for composing brochures) but

regular text editors wouldn't be expected to implement this style.

5.2.7 Layout of Characters

In the Spanish language, words are separated by spaces and a line can be broken at a space, a

punctuation sign or a hyphenated word.

There are several sets of paired characters in Spanish. Unlike English, question marks and excla 

mation signs are also paired. Other paired characters are the same as English (parenthesis, square

brackets, and so forth). Opening characters shouldn't appear at the end of a line. Closing char 

acters and punctuation signs such as period and comma shouldn't appear at the beginning of a

line.

Words can be broken at a syllabus and hyphenated. Unlike English, syllabi in Spanish end in a

vowel more often than in a consonant. Syllabi that end in a consonant letter are typically at the

end of a word or followed by a syllabus that starts with another consonant. Anyway, the rules are

not completely consistent and a hyphenation dictionary has to be used.

5.2.8 LANG variable

For Bash

set meta flag on

# keep all 8 bits for keyboard input

set output meta on

# keep all 8 bits for terminal output

set convert meta off

# don't convert escape sequences

export LC_CTYPE=ISO_8859_1