Ellipses and tags and bears, oh my

[vr8ce]

Calibre 3.39 on

1. What is it about the editor that "eats" Mac shortcut keys for special characters? For example, Option(Alt)-; to get an ellipsis, Option-0 to get a degree symbol, etc. None of them work in the editor. Weirdly (or maybe not), they do work in the Find/Replace input fields. (I searched here for "Mac ellipsis" and a couple of other things, couldn't find any mentions.)

2. Closing tag autocomplete works great. It's awesome. When it works. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. And it doesn't work often enough to be really annoying. (I look up to find almost my entire file is italic and have to backtrace to figure out why.)

When it fails, instead of putting in the closing tag, it puts in the word between the tags. (This most often happens to me when putting em's on either side of a word.)

IOW, I get `<em>word</word>` instead of `<em>word</em>`. It's filling in the word after the opening tag, instead of the opening tag.

When this happens, there is nothing structurally wrong with the file being edited. That is, everything is beautified, and F7 shows no problems.

It also typically corrects itself after a few times. IOW, I'll get the word instead of the closing tag for one or three or six times, then suddenly it goes back to putting in the correct closing tag, and it will do that for a several minutes, and then suddenly it will put in the word again once or twice or four times, then correct itself again, and so on.

This isn't new, it's happened as long as I've been using Calibre (three years?), I've just never brought it up because it is sporadic and therefore not reproducible. But it seems to be happening more lately (I rolled back to 3.39 because 3.40 started doing it immediately in the book I was editing at the time and I didn't have time to mess with it. It may not be worse in 3.40, I just didn't have time to see.)

It's happened across several OS releases, many Calibre releases, several hundred files, multiple computers, etc. But, as I said, it's inconsistent. It's not file related—sometimes simply closing and re-opening the file "fixes" it. (And sometimes it doesn't.) Sometimes leaving Calibre and coming back in fixes it. (And sometimes it doesn't.)

Does anyone else see this? Any ideas on the possible cause?

(I searched "closing tag", "autocomplete tag", and "autofill tag" in the Editor forum. I found one thread back in '14 where an error was occurring if the closing tag was started after a space, but that was fixed almost immediately. I didn't find any other references.)

[kovidgoyal]

1. no idea, will investigate when I have access to a mac, but sadl that is not going to be sometime soon. Open a ticket for it so I dont forget.

2. What autoclose are you referring to? You mean when typing </
Never seen or heard of what you describe being reported before.

[vr8ce]

1. Will do.

2. Yes. With "<em>word", typing "</" will occasionally get autocompleted to "<em>word</word>" instead of "<em>word</em>". It's a rare editing session where it never happens, but it usually only happens a time or three. But, as described, sometimes it wants to stick around for a while.

[vr8ce]

I mis-spoke on #1. I thought I had tried others, but clearly I hadn't. My apologies.

It appears to be only Option-; that doesn't work. All the others I have tried do work. So the book editor itself is treating Option-; as a plain semi-colon, while the editor's Find/Replace input boxes process it normally, i.e. it results in an ellipsis.

I opened a ticket accordingly.

[kovidgoyal]

that's likely because semi-colons are handled specially for automatic conversion of type entities.

[vr8ce]

Fix for Option-; confirmed, thanks very much, Kovid!

(The autocomplete tagging still happens occasionally, don't know what else to do to debug it.)

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by vr8ce

2. Yes. With "<em>word", typing "</" will occasionally get autocompleted to "<em>word</word>" instead of "<em>word</em>". It's a rare editing session where it never happens, but it usually only happens a time or three. But, as described, sometimes it wants to stick around for a while.

Sometimes you have to wait for the file to be re-parsed before it knows what tag it's closing. For example, I sometimes type "<h1>Blah</" and the editor autocompletes it as "</h>" or the like. Give it a few seconds to catch up, delete the closing tag, then try "</" again and it works. The larger the file is, the longer it takes, obviously.

[deback]

Your #2 in the original post happens to me often. I type fast, and I'm sure if I slowed down a little, the autocomplete end tag would be fine. I have a macro for <p class="linespace"> and when I'm manually entering </p>, sometimes Calibre will automatically enter </body>.

[kovidgoyal]

This should take care of that issue

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...e982c8b4e60a4c

[vr8ce]

Both of those things (re-parsing, typing too fast) are possible causes, since I don't know the cause, but I find them unlikely in my case.

First, it's always the word previous that it completes with (<em>word</word>), not part of the word, and not anything else.
Second, I am a fast typer as well, but when I catch the problem and delete the incorrect tag and re-type the </, it repeats the problem. It doesn't matter the speed of the typing.
Last, I don't work on large documents. They typically max out at 2K or so. And "waiting a bit" doesn't help.

Nevertheless, I'll be curious to see if Kovid's change improves the situation.