I'll never be more than a casual user of the editor to fix format and layout 'glitches', essentially fine-tuning. For content editing, general layout etc I'll always prefer a something like MS Word or Atlantis.
I've been following the
nbsp and nnbsp codes thread with interest.
One of the annoyances I have with the editor is when I'm scanning the preview and edit windows I cannot see a distinct representation of special characters, preferably the edit window along with all the other 'technical' stuff.
I appreciate I can move the cursor to the yellow lozenge and I'll see the precise name of what's behind it in the status line. But I find it tiresome to have pick up the mouse and position the cursor to the lozenge, besides not all special characters appear as a yellow lozenge (e.g. nnbsp), they're 'invisible', admittedly when I move the cursor 'there' they show in the status line, but...
I don't care how these things are represented internally, I leave that to Kovid and other's folks better judgement.
What I yearn for is a button that would unhide the special characters and show them as highlighted decipherable mnemonics, something like this
where the background colour is specific to displaying special character mnemonics. Ideally the mnemonics would be the same as what's in the Special Character tables and other resources.
I'm puzzled as to how other people cope without something like I propose. One of the perennial complaints about word processors is that they selectively hide special characters, it surprises me that this seems to be the case in this editor. I would rank a feature such as this much higher than I would a spell checker or macros.
But maybe it's already possible - I frequently find that things I wish were in calibre, are already there
BR