[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Morea

Why?

Perhaps you can give up such a feature in English, but not in German with its long and composited words... you will never find all German word combinations in a dictionary.

Soft Hyphens are very bad.

I wrote about some of the reasons why in 2018: "Auto-Hyphenate" (many of those linked posts going back to 2013 + 2008!).

Across various devices/programs, they break:

• Search
• Spellchecking
• Dictionaries
  
  • Where you press+hold to get a definition.
• Highlighting
• Copy/Pasting
• Auto-Hyphenation
  
  • Especially in non-English languages.
    
  • Some languages have hyphenation rules where:
    
    • different/duplicate letters appear
      
    • accents drop off
      
    • hyphens needed at the end AND beginning of lines
      
• ...

Like JSWolf said, much better to use a device/app that has built-in hyphenation for your language.

Almost all modern devices/apps have this now... for example, Kobos/Kindles already have built-in German hyphenation.

If you are on a very old device, perhaps there is a case to apply HyphenateThis! to your personal copy... but definitely never use it in an ebook meant for sale.

Note: Hyphenation Dictionaries work by patterns.

They list combinations of letters where hyphens can occur, then apply that across the entire text.

It's not like they list hundreds of thousands of every word known to man:

- hyphenate
- hyphenated
- hyphenates
- hyphenation
- hyphenations
- hyphenating

Instead, these hyphenation dictionaries list hundreds of patterns/rules like:

- "If a word ends in -ing OR -tion, you can stick a hyphen there."
- "If a word begins with anti- or semi-, you can stick a hyphen there."

Every language is going to have different patterns/rules, and people have already created these dictionaries for many of the main languages... even smaller ones like Welsh.

So even if you came up with some super cool new English word like:

- superduperliciousness

the device will auto-hyphenate correctly:

- su-per-duper-li-cious-ness

or let me toss it in my:

- hyphenatinginator
- hy-phen-ating-i-na-tor

Spoiler:

The dictionaries got those 2 made-up words almost perfect.

Could've had one between "du-per" + "at-ing".

But 99.9999+% of all auto-hyphens will be correct. There are only a few hundred words in English where the patterns got it wrong, and those exceptions are known and accounted for.

Originally Posted by Morea

Yes I know. But what entity code do I have to search for?

And who gets the idea to search for invisible characters when he wants to find out the reason for a behaviour of his book file?

That's not very intuitive, in my opinion.

Usually you notice invisible characters when things start going very wrong/strange:

• Random question marks ? or � appearing in the middle of your EPUB
• Red squigglies under perfectly spelled words
• Random hyphens appearing/disappearing as you type.
• ...

To get a list of ALL characters used in the EPUB:

In Calibre's Editor:

Tools > Reports > Characters

and in Sigil:

Tools > Reports > Characters in HTML Files

This will list "invisible characters" like Soft Hyphens, Thin Spaces, Zero-Width Joiners, etc.

You can double-click on a character in the Report, and it will fill in the correct codes in the Find box for you.

If I spot soft hyphens in the ebook, I make sure to always remove them.