Viewer - Hidden Text in search

[BetterRed]

Today's was my first attempt to use the Viewer's recently enhanced search feature. I'm getting lots of the following when searching ePubs for simple one word search terms.

calibre, version 4.11.2
WARNING: Hidden text: Some search results were for hidden or non-reflowable text, they will be removed.

These were very simple books, of 4 to 6 sections/chapters/files, no pictures (not even a cover), no embedded fonts, no tables, just plain, no bold, no italics etc, text - created from very straightforward styled DOCX files.

I tried merging the xhtml files into one as I thought it might have something to do with the issue, but I still get the messages.

What I don't understand is that the 'correct' snippets are shown in the sidebar - i.e. they match what I see in Word using the same searches on the DOCX source docs. It's when I start selecting them that I get the message. Which leads me to ask, if there are instances of the search in hidden or non-replowable text why are they even in the side bar? BTW In the context of an ePub book, I don't know how to hide or create non-reflowable text.

This may be relevant: when I click on a snippet in the search sidebar, the Copy to clipboard button in the toolbar flashes. This happens whilst the viewer is getting to that location, or removing items from the search snippets list etc, this can take a second or two. Does the viewer make any 'internal' use of the clipboard - as far as I can tell it does not, so why is that button flashing one asks?

A search seems to populate an entire list of snippets considerably faster than it sometimes takes to display the page on which a selected snippet appears.

If I select another search list snippet after some have been removed, it seems to reinstate some and remove other snippets, and the text in the viewer windows is very often positioned to the very last occurrence of the search term - which was not the item I selected

MID FLIGHT UPDATE - It may have something to do with the size of the list and/or the 'speed' of navigating through it. Sometimes I can hold down F3 and traverse the entire list of ambassador's in War and Peace. Other times I can't click on two or three randomly with getting the WARNING and a depleted list. Searches with lots of snippets seem to suffer the problem more than searches with just a few snippets.

NB: the War and Peace example is an epub I got from here, I wanted to be reasonably sure that my DOCX's and conversion were not causing the problem.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Because searching happens in two phases, one is searching the actual book text and the second is actually displaying that text rendered in the book. For various reasons, the rendered text can be hidden/not displayable, in which case the search result is removed when the viewer tries to find the displayable text and fails. However, this should be exceedingly rare in practice (I have mostly seen it on fixed layout EPUBs to date. So if you have examples of it happening, I'd like some text cases.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

So if you have examples of it happening, I'd like some text cases.

Attaching a screenshot, and book. I typed 'educat' and pressed Enter, after the list was displayed I clicked on the highlighted item.

Its possible I double clicked, but I've also had the WARNING when I've used F3/Shift+F3 to traverse the list.

When I exited the viewer I got this in a popup, I've not seen this one before

calibre, version 4.11.2
ERROR: Failed to load file from book: Could not load the file: OEBPS/Text/09_Dedication.xhtml with error: Failed to communicate with "/book/OEBPS/Text/09_Dedication.xhtml?1582429281131", timed out after: 60 seconds

The book, temp, cache etc are on a Toshiba NVMe.M2 SSD so timing out seems odd.

BTW - I just happened to have the Wollstonecraft on my desktop as a reminder. I get the problem on every book I try, my own, as well as PD books like the Tolstoy and this one.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

This will be because you have turned on regex mode, that is a bit rough, its on my todo list to improve it.

[BetterRed]

Correct, it was Regex. But I'm sure I changed it back to Contains.

So I just changed it again, but it didn't seem to 'stick' if I'd already done a search. So, I started over; changed it to Contains and exited, and then did a search, as a result Contains seems to have stuck -- and most importantly I'm not getting the weird warnings.

That was simple enough - thanks.

BR