Calibre deletes soft Hyphens in Epub ?

[NASCARaddicted]

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, or if I just have a setting in calibre wrong.

This is my problem: I got a html file that is full of long words. I want to add hyphonation for this words.

I know their are 3 different codes for soft hyphens: ­ ­ and ­

Well, I put this codes into different words in the html file. Everything looks good in Firefox. So I converted the html file into an epub file, with Calibre. Strangely, the hyphenations didn't show up on my Bebook.

So I opened the epub (by renaming it to zip) and looked at the html file inside. And to my surprise, all the soft hyphens have been gone. How can this be ? Other html codes like umlauts work fine. So how does it come that the soft hyphenations are gone ? Is there something wrong with Calibre or my settings ? I tried it with and without the "no text justification" setting. (I thought this might solve the problem, but it didn't)

Oh and by the way: I heard that there would be an easier way for hyphenation ? Like a database on your ebook reader where you can enter the words and their correct hyphenations. (I think I heard something like this will come with CSS3 - does the Bebook support this ?)

Thanks for your help

[kovidgoyal]

They aren't gone, they're converted to the corresponding UTF-8 character, which most editors wont display. And the BeBook doesn't support soft hyphens.

[NASCARaddicted]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And the BeBook doesn't support soft hyphens.

O.k. thanks for the fast reply.

I gotta say I once found an epub file (on some forum, can't remember which one) that included soft hyphens - and it worked on the BeBook. However there were no dashes at the end of the syllable so it still looked strange.

I think I will stop using soft hyphens ... it's not so important anyway.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And the BeBook doesn't support soft hyphens.

The latest mobile ADE, e.g. on the BeBook, does support soft hyphens. Like the Desktop version, it does not add the hyphen at the end of the line if the word is actually broken there. It supports ISO 8859-1 encoding, but I did not test UTF. See Soft Hyphens.

The Sony's handle soft hyphens badly, so my first thought when reading the original post is that the output is customized for the PRS-505 (say).

[kovidgoyal]

Hmm, my impression was formed from trying an older firmware revision of the BeBook. You can test if the sift hyphens are actually in the output by opening the file with the calibre viewer (it wont render the hyphens but it will break words on them).