Spanish

The new style file for babel, released officialy as part of release 3.7, provides lots of new features to allow a true Spanish look and feel regarding typography, following mainly the books on the subject by José Martínez de Sousa. Thus, you will have, amongst others:

• Translations following the International TEX conventions, as well as date (with both "de" and "del" variants before the year).
• Shorthands like << and >> (for guillemets), non breakable dashes, raised ¿ and ¡ (for all uppercase texts), etc.
• Dots followed by digits replaced by decimal commas.
• Spanish ordinals and abbreviations, with the preceptive dot included.
• Accented functions: lím, máx, etc.
• In case spanish is the main language, the layout is adjusted: enumerate, itemize, lists with ñ, footnotes with asteriscs, lowercase roman with small caps, etc.

More about the decisions taken, in Spanish, on:

• Decisiones en spanish para babel.

New. Version 5.0 (released 2007-02-21) extends its capabilities further and makes it a lot more customizable and easier to use. This is the first major revision since it was released in 1997 (by then named spanishb).

Free downloads
Note. The package comes in two flavours - as dtx/ins installer and as TDS files. The latter contains two files (spanish.ldf and romanidx.sty) which replaces spanish.ldf and romanidx.tex (note romanidx has changed its extensión) under the babel directory (spanish.sty does not change at all and esbst will be distributed as a separate package, as strictly is not part of babel), but note you still need the dtx file if you want to typeset the reference (which is available as PDF file as well).

Nota. El paquete viene en dos variantes: como dtx/ins o como archivos TDS. El último contiene dos archivos (spanish.ldf and romanidx.sty) que reemplazan spanish.ldf and romanidx.tex (obsérvese el cambio de extensión de romanidx) en el directorio de babel (spanish.sty no cambia en absoluto y esbst se distribuirá como un paquete separado, pues no es estrictamente parte de babel), pero hay que señalar que se necesita el dtx si se quiere componer la referencia (que también está disponible como PDF).

• spanish-dtx.zip Spanish 5.0a (dtx/ins, ZIP, 32k).
• spanish-tds.zip Spanish 5.0a (TDS, ZIP, 10k).
• spanish.pdf. Reference, in Spanish (PDF, 190k).
• spanish-full.pdf. Full reference, with tips and examples, in Spanish (not yet available).
• tipografia.pdf. Tipografía española con TeX, conference at EGUTH 1999, Madrid, in Spanish (PDF, 53k).

Bugs and know problems
El contenido de label en enumitem no admite ordenes frágiles. Pero spanish 4 añade una: \es@listquot. Está corregido en la versión 5.0, pero una solución para la 4 es añadir en el preámbulo tras cargar spanish:

\makeatletter
\let\savees@listquot\es@listquot
\def\es@listquot{\protect\savees@listquot}
\makeatletter

Por un problema en dcolumn (véase LaTeX bug report tools/3759 (dcolumn conflict with icomma package), el punto decimal puede fallar en ese paquete. Una solución rápida es:

\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\decimalpoint
\usepackage{dcolumn}
\newcolumntype{.}{D{.}{\esperiod}{-1}}
\makeatletter
\addto\shorthandsspanish{\let\esperiod\es@period@code}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
etc.