MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How do I put a non-breaking space in an author's name?

TheRealJohnAdams · 05-21-2020, 09:49 AM

It's fixed. Thanks, all—and especially @davidfor—for the help. For anyone who finds this thread in the future, the problem and solution were as follows:

When I attempted to manually type a hard space into the author field, it would turn into an ordinary space as soon as I pressed return. I thought this meant that Calibre did not support hard spaces in metadata (which is why I tried to use markup codes), but that is not correct. The solution, which works perfectly, is to go to the Manage Authors window (right click -> Edit Metadata -> click the button to the left of the author field) and edit the relevant author entry to use hard spaces as appropriate. When you do that, all book entries that share that author will have hard spaces.

My guess is that when the author field for a book record is updated, Calibre compares the new author with the existing Authors table. This comparison treats all whitespace the same and is probably case-insensitive too. If a matching author exists, the new author entry is modified to conform to the matching record in the Authors table. In other words, say you have a book with author "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2." The Authors table will contain an entry for "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2." If you edit the book's author to be "John Q. LastName1 nbsp LastName2," Calibre compares that to the Authors table, matches it with "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2," and modifies what you just entered to conform to the entry in the Authors table—destroying your non-breaking space.

05-21-2020, 09:49 AM	#9
TheRealJohnAdams Enthusiast Posts: 42 Karma: 57668 Join Date: May 2020 Device: Kindle Oasis, Kobo Forma, Onyx Page	Solution It's fixed. Thanks, all—and especially @davidfor—for the help. For anyone who finds this thread in the future, the problem and solution were as follows: When I attempted to manually type a hard space into the author field, it would turn into an ordinary space as soon as I pressed return. I thought this meant that Calibre did not support hard spaces in metadata (which is why I tried to use markup codes), but that is not correct. The solution, which works perfectly, is to go to the Manage Authors window (right click -> Edit Metadata -> click the button to the left of the author field) and edit the relevant author entry to use hard spaces as appropriate. When you do that, all book entries that share that author will have hard spaces. My guess is that when the author field for a book record is updated, Calibre compares the new author with the existing Authors table. This comparison treats all whitespace the same and is probably case-insensitive too. If a matching author exists, the new author entry is modified to conform to the matching record in the Authors table. In other words, say you have a book with author "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2." The Authors table will contain an entry for "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2." If you edit the book's author to be "John Q. LastName1 nbsp LastName2," Calibre compares that to the Authors table, matches it with "John Q. LastName1 space LastName2," and modifies what you just entered to conform to the entry in the Authors table—destroying your non-breaking space.