special characters e & i with horizontal line above
 

i have this quote? in a Joe Haldeman short story collection, at the start of one story:

Dis Buk wil tel dē storē of dē Burning, and of whī
Each 80 yērs Men have to hīd from Wind and Sē and Skī
And how dē first Men first went Nōrd to flē dē Burning Sun,
And whī God rids dē Wrld of Līf when Līf has jus begun.
—Godbuk 1, 1, 1-4

my sony reader does not like those overscored e and i characters ( they are OK in my browser & in sigil book view - is it possible to get them to display in epub without too much complication ?

there are not in the sigil special characters table.

and what language is this extract - some form of ye-olde-english ???

The ADE default fonts don't cover the Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block.

You can add the book to Calibre, do an epub to epub conversion and have Calibre embed Arial, Times Roman or another system font.

Since you're familiar with Sigil you could also manually embed a font. :-)

? i don't see those ē & ī characters on that latin supplement link either. i see various things over e- acuet, grace, unmlaut, & some i don't know the names of... but not a horizontal line ?

I mixed up the Unicode ranges: it's "Latin Extended-A".

ok thanks - does the unicode range name of latin imply a connection with the language Latin or is that co-incidence ?

do these characters appear in any modern language i.e. am I ever likely to encounter them in a different book ? If not, I'll just substitute normal e & i .

There is a connection, but it doesn't mean those characters are used to typeset Latin (although they may be). The name Latin here is because this alphabet we are using is called the Latin one, because it was originally used for Latin (as opposed to Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, etc, which use different writing systems). English, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish, Swahili, Basque, Hungarian... all use the Latin characters, some of them with some modifications.

You are unlikely to find them, unless you like reading scholarly texts about old or foreign languages, in which case you'd probably already know that. If you want more information, that horizontal line is called a macron.

Since these characters usually indicate the length of a vowel, you lose bits of information, if you replace them with unaccented characters.

IMHO, it'd be better, if you replaced them with vowels with a circumflex:

ā = â, ē = ê, ī = î, ō = ô, ū = û

(Several Latin textbooks use this transliteration method, and ADE supports them because they're used in French.)

good idea - thanks

update- it seems that when I insert special character as discussed above sigil adds all the crap below. I think I highlighted the charcter to be replaced & clicked on the appropriate one in the special character table. It displays OK but look at the generated code - surely overkill!

this was with 7.1.

alternatively it is possible i did search find replace all with the appropriate characters in the regex fields.

<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->

all that code for each instance of ê !

PS i tried just now to reproduce it with v7.2 working in book view but I did not get any of this start fragment stuff

That crap originates from Microsoft office. It is from their version of html/xml. It is hard to imagine that sigil will add that.

that is NOT the case. I have the epub backed up from before I tried to alter those characters; there is no sign of that added code in the backup. I did all edits in Sigil 7.1 (possibly via book view) so sigil must have added the code QED

before:

book view

Dis Buk wil tel dē storē of dē Burning, and of whī
Each 80 yērs Men have to hīd from Wind and Sē and Skī
And how dē first Men first went Nōrd to flē dē Burning Sun,
And whī God rids dē Wrld of Līf when Līf has jus begun.
—Godbuk 1, 1, 1-4

code view
<p class="left"><i class="calibre1">Dis Buk wil tel dē storē of dē Burning, and of whī<br class="calibre2" />
Each 80 yērs Men have to hīd from Wind and Sē and Skī<br class="calibre2" />
And how dē first Men first went Nōrd to flē dē Burning Sun,<br class="calibre2" />
And whī God rids dē Wrld of Līf when Līf has jus begun.</i></p>

after ( I manually removed the first couple of instances of the crap here, to check that it could be gotten rid off , but you can see the many instances where I have not yet removed it
book view

Dis Buk wil tel dê store of dê Burning, and of whî
Each 80 yêrs Men have to hîd from Wind and Sê and Skî
And how dê first Men first went Nôrd to flê dê Burning Sun,
And whî God rids dê Wrld of Lîf when Lîf has jus begun.
—Godbuk 1, 1, 1-4

code view
<blockquote class="calibre10">
<p class="left"><i class="calibre1">Dis Buk wil tel dê&nbsp;store of dê&nbsp;Burning, and of whî<br class="calibre2" />
Each 80 y<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->rs Men have to hîd from Wind and S<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->&nbsp;and Skî<br class="calibre2" />
And how d<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->&nbsp;first Men first went Nôrd to flê d<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->&nbsp;Burning Sun,<br class="calibre2" />
And whî God rids d<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:&quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">ê</span><!--EndFragment-->&nbsp;Wrld of Lîf when Lîf has jus begun.</i></p>

<p class="right">—Godbuk 1, 1, 1-4</p>
</blockquote>

PS I suppose the only other possibility - long shot - is that I grabbed the desired characters from this browser window ( chrome) after they had been suggested earlier in the thread & pasted each character into the replace box of sigil find/replace regex - could that cause it..
I really don't think that I did that though

Strange, since AFAK the mso-stuff stands for Microsoft Office... Perhaps because it uses Visual Tools libraries???

i definitely did not expose any version of this epub to MS office!

What about embedding a FOSS font that includes those ranges, and not using the ADE default?