Sigil compatibility (a wish)

[roger64]

Hi

I switch regularly between the two excellent Editors which I find complementary. To explain, I usually begin and end with Sigil plugins (ODTImport and Epubcheck among others) and in the middle I work with the Editor for group regexes, stylesheet tweaks, functions and so on.

As it happens, French (but also Russians and others) make a tremendous use of no-break spaces either normal or narrow (for me about 50/50).

Unhappily Sigil has been plagued for years by a Qtedit bug which forces them to avoid &_nbsp; and use &#_160; instead of the \u_00a0 the Calibre Editor uses. Very probably this will continue for some time. Recently, this problem got worse as I now need to force Sigil to use automatically &#x_202f; instead of \u_202f to get it visibly displayed in Code view...

So when I come back from Sigil to the Editor I have to perform the regex below, which I sometimes forget ...

Spoiler:

{
  "searches": [
    {
      "case_sensitive": false, 
      "dot_all": false, 
      "find": " |&#_160;", 
      "mode": "regex", 
      "name": "[w2x] INS Retour Sigil Convertir nbsp et 160 en  UTF8", 
      "replace": "\\u00a0"
    }, 
    {
      "case_sensitive": false, 
      "dot_all": false, 
      "find": " ", 
      "mode": "regex", 
      "name": "[w2x] INS Retour Sigil fines entité", 
      "replace": "\\u202f"
    }
  ], 
  "version": 1
}

Though I willingly admit this is not the Editor problem, it would be great for all dual users to be able to switch painlessly from one Editor to another without having to use a regex (*). Casual users will be lost by these tricky compatibillity questions.

My wish would be that, on opening any Epub, the Editor could transform automatically these unwanted entities. To enable this feature, it should be enough to tick a box in the Preferences panel named for example "Sigil no-break space conversion".

* this forced regex looks like a visa

[kovidgoyal]

Just click Tools->Beautify all files and the entities will be replaced automatically.

[roger64]

and there is a "Beautify automatically" tick box in the Preferences that I duly activated.

[JSWolf]

There is an epubcheck plugin for Calibre's editor. I use it a lot.