@eschwartz: Any idea if QT is also to blame for both Sigil and Calibre Editor search/replace fields (or into html code itself) not excepting that same soft hyphen character when I input it using
Autohotkey's hotkey/hotstring? Or even using Alt+0173 shortcut.
I know I could use: "Insert special character"> Shy, but that is not as convenient.
Easiest workaround so far for me is to open Notepad via Autohotkey shortcut, input special character via hotstring (.sh for soft hyphen, .mdash for — etc), and then select and copy character from Notepad to Calibre/Sigil search or code view.
Of the ones that I regularly use "Shy" is so far the first one that both editors ignore.
Because hyphenated footnotes/endnotes text looks awful in PW1 & PW2 pop out window (because of forced left alignment) usually after using HyphenateThis plugin I manually remove soft hyphens using search/replace just for endnotes html file.