The author describes a method for the insertion of hyphenation procedures for Spanish into text processing systems, most of which were designed for use with English. He studies the specific problems that arise from the syllabic structures of Spanish as well as from the typographical conventions that Hispanic writers have traditionally adopted.

The method described is primarily based on the study of Spanish orthographic and syllabic structures, which provide the first set of breaking rules. A second layer of rules translates traditional conventions of word partitioning. The third component is an aesthetic parameter: an adjustable threshold that allows the user to balance the percentage of hyphenations against the volume of spaces for a given document. This threshold introduces a pleasant flexibility in the modulation of the rules. The set of algorithms has been implemented in C and tested with the lexical analyzer generator lex, and the author gives some performance data.

This work will interest people working on text processing; in a wider context, it makes a useful contribution to the current research in document structures retrieval [1]. A lot of Hispanic people should also appreciate this work, as Spanish is a major human language and the algorithms are linguistically rooted.