Special Character highlighting

[Karellen]

Hello @kovidgoyal

I am wondering if the following is expected behaviour.

I have added a background colour to Special Character as shown in the image.

The problem is that the highlighting disappears when the cursor is placed on the same line, so it is a bit like whack-a-mole when trying to edit special characters. Is that meant to happen?
See video...

https://streamable.com/wqgvey

[kovidgoyal]

Its probably conflicting with the current line highlighting, try turning that off.

[Karellen]

Thanks @kovidgoyal

Sorry I am not sure which is "current line highlighting". Is it "CursorLine" in the custom theme dialogue? It is not set but I clicked the X button to clear it anyway and it made no difference.

[kovidgoyal]

Yes its cursorline the other option is change the special characcter highlight style to use a different foreground color or an underline.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

the other option is change the special characcter highlight style to use a different foreground color or an underline.

Thanks.
Yep using a foreground colour works in a limited capacity. As long as there is something to display, then it shows that character in a different colour. Unfortunately for non displaying items like em, en etc spaces, there is nothing to colour.

Then using an underline is too subtle and either blends into a misspelt word underline, or is just too hard to see at a glance.

I guess it's probably too hard to fix the conflict. No problems, I've been working with the issue for quite a while now, so just business as usual. Thought I would raise it in case no-one had come across it before.

[lomkiri]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Thought I would raise it in case no-one had come across it before.

I did indeed, I run in the very same need (and issue) than you, trying to configure the editor to make visible the special chars inside the highlight lines, but I've failed as well. I have to move the selected line downward to see if there is a special char in the targeted line, which is not very practical, but I can live with this :-).

Anyway, if it would be possible to give precedence to the background color of the special chars over the background color of the selected line, it would be helpful. But maybe it's a Qt feature, not a calibre one ?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Yep using a foreground colour works in a limited capacity. As long as there is something to display, then it shows that character in a different colour. Unfortunately for non displaying items like em, en etc, there is nothing to colour.

Out of curiosity, what are you doing to make em or en characters non-displaying?

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Out of curiosity, what are you doing to make em or en characters non-displaying?

Either picking the space character from the "Insert Special Character" dialogue, or
Using one of my snippets, or
typing html   which then auto-converts.

Why, do your space characters display something?

[DNSB]

Sorry, I was thinking of the em — and en – dash. An   is a non-breaking space though you could also be using  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,   or   for other width spaces and other than the ‍, they do display as spaces of varying width so I don't think of them as non-displaying—I reserve that for characters that have no visible effect such as the ‍.

I seldom using the non-breaking space so I've never worried about seeing them.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Sorry, I was thinking of the em — and en – dash. An   is a non-breaking space though you could also be using  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,   or   for other width spaces and other than the ‍, they do display as spaces of varying width so I don't think of them as non-displaying—I reserve that for characters that have no visible effect such as the ‍.

I seldom using the non-breaking space so I've never worried about seeing them.

No problems.
Some books I see are littered with unusual spaces, especially the no-break space, for no apparent reason. Some are obvious why they are needed, like the elongated ellipses with spaces between each dot or between nested quotation marks... " 'I quote', he told me!". Most instances have a standard space accompanying it for some reason. So I clean them out.

[DNSB]

For characters like the ellipsis, I replace the fake ellipsis with a real one ( . . . vs … ). This does disagree with some stylebooks that suggest either 3 periods with non-breaking spaces or 3 periods with no spacing but I prefer the single ellipsis character.

What is likely my most disliked &nbsp; usage is when every bloody paragraph ends with &160;</p>. Again something that I use saved searches to clean up. One other horrid example was an indie author who decided that they wanted 2 spaces between each sentence so each sentence ended in a &nbsp;<space> pair.

[kovidgoyal]

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...7bc9ecd09a7616

[lomkiri]

Thanks a lot, Kovid :-)

[Karellen]

Oh wow!! I wasn't expecting a fix.

Thank you @kovidgoyal

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Sorry, I was thinking of the em — and en – dash. An &nbsp; is a non-breaking space though you could also be using &ensp;, &emsp;, &emsp13;, &hairsp;, &thinsp;, &puncsp; or &numsp; for other width spaces and other than the &zwj;, they do display as spaces of varying width so I don't think of them as non-displaying—I reserve that for characters that have no visible effect such as the &zwj;.

The equivalent non-displaying space is &ZeroWidthSpace;. HTML renderers will break lines as if it were a visible space, but the character has an Advance Width of zero.

&zwj; is for joining two characters that should semantically be one, but cannot be because of Unicode limitations.

&nbsp; and &NoBreak; are the non-breaking companions to the space character and &ZeroWidthSpace;.