[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I doubt there are many legitimate 4+ single characters by themselves

Since there are no italics blackletter fonts, German printers had to use increased letter spacing for emphasis. I.e., there might be even longer words.

@famfam I found a suitable regex in a German forum and used it to create a simple throwaway plugin that should automatically remove all unwanted spaces. Please make a backup copy before running this plugin!

Note that if you uncomment the following line in plugin.py by removing the # sign:

#unspaced_word = '<span class="italics">{}</span>'.format(unspaced_word)

the plugin will wrap all replaced words in <span> tags.

And for completeness' sake here are instruction for Calibre Editor:

• Paste (?<=[ ])([\w][ ]+){1,}[\w](?=[ .,:;!?]) in the Find box.
• Select Regex-function from the Mode drop-down box.
• Click Create/Edit, paste the following code in the Code box:
  
  

  def replace(match, number, file_name, metadata, dictionaries, data, functions, *args, **kwargs):
      spaced_word = match.group(0)
      unspaced_word = spaced_word.replace(' ', '')
      #unspaced_word = '<span class="italics">{}</span>'.format(unspaced_word)
      return unspaced_word

• enter a function name, e.g. Spacer, and click OK.

BTW, you also might want to post your question in the German MR subforum.