Option for removing soft hyphens?
 

Sigh. Soft hyphens worked great in the old eReader.com PDB files, so I've been dutifully adding them in my ebooks. However, now that I'm using ePub files, they don't show up. I originally thought it was because the Nook for Android reader didn't support them, but I finally looked at the actual ePub file generated by Calibre, and it looks like the soft hyphens are being stripped out.

And yes, I'm pretty sure they're gone because I viewed the HTML source (exploded from the ePub) using a hex viewer, so this isn't a case of not seeing the UTF-8 character or something like that.

From another thread, I see that this was done because a lot of ereaders don't support soft hyphens (I'm using ­ in the original HTML source). My question is, can we get an option not to strip them out? Or is there a way to muck with the settings to they stay in?

Incidentally, does anyone know which ereaders support soft hyphens and which don't? What happens on the ones that don't?

I forget all the details, but there are a variety of issues with readers that don't support them (and most don't):

• Displays soft hyphens as question marks throughout the text
• Displays soft hyphens as hyphens throughout the text
• Breaks on soft hyphens as expected, but doesn't display hyphens anywhere, including the actual line/word breaks.

Example with ADE here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28108

And a laundry list of reading software here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28139

I'm not sure if Calibre always deletes them, it may be dependent on which conversion features you have enabled - I think if you enable heuristics they get removed, but otherwise may be kept. See here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57086

Another side effect is the soft hyphens will break text search in most (all?) ePub reading systems.

Further reading here:
http://infogridpacific.typepad.com/u...continued.html