Thread: Strange  character appearing throughout e-book text
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Old 01-27-2010, 08:13 AM   #18
Valloric
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Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski View Post
This first ('Sigil test Original.epub') was deliberately created using ANSI encoding in Notepad++ and (correctly) specifies ISO-8859-1 encoding in the xml specification. The accented 'é' appears correctly in both ADE and Calibre's epub reader.

The second ('Sigil test opened in Sigil.epub') is the same file which has simply been opened in Sigil and immediately saved without any editing. the 'é' has now become a '?' in ADE and Calibre, because Sigil assumed that the encoding was utf-8, disregarding the encoding specified in the file, and changed the encoding attribute in the specification.
Sigil doesn't just "change" the encoding attribute and then pretend everything will work right. Come on. It tries to recognize the original encoding of the file and convert the text to UTF-8. After some recent changes, it's actually become pretty successful at this.

Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski View Post
I don't know what you'd call this, but I'd say that was a significant change in the code. I don't think it's something that necessarily needs to be fixed, and as I said before, this behaviour can be used to fix sloppy mistakes without the user needing to know much about what they're doing. But it is something that Sigil users need to be aware of - Sigil rigidly assumes that all the text it processes is UTF-8, and any edits need to be made with that in mind.
That's patently false. Read this blog post.

But bugs are always possible. I'll check what's going on with this file and report back.

In general, you should report any problems on the tracker so they get scheduled and fixed. You're not doing anyone any favors (least of all yourself) by not reporting bugs. I've heard people feel like reporting bugs or missing features is "undue criticism": couldn't be farther from the truth. The more bug reports, the better.

Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski View Post
Sigil also strips out metadata elements in the body text xhtml that are irrelevant. Again, not a big problem for most users, though if you have a workflow that uses custom metadata fields it's something you really need to know about. If you look at the html inside the two epubs you'll see that's happened here, the custom metadata has been stripped.
Actually this is something that's being worked on. Sigil should preserve your custom metadata, I completely agree. See this thread for the metadata discussion.
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