Option for removing soft hyphens?

[WarnerYoung]

Sigh. Soft hyphens worked great in the old eReader.com PDB files, so I've been dutifully adding them in my ebooks. However, now that I'm using ePub files, they don't show up. I originally thought it was because the Nook for Android reader didn't support them, but I finally looked at the actual ePub file generated by Calibre, and it looks like the soft hyphens are being stripped out.

And yes, I'm pretty sure they're gone because I viewed the HTML source (exploded from the ePub) using a hex viewer, so this isn't a case of not seeing the UTF-8 character or something like that.

From another thread, I see that this was done because a lot of ereaders don't support soft hyphens (I'm using ­ in the original HTML source). My question is, can we get an option not to strip them out? Or is there a way to muck with the settings to they stay in?

Incidentally, does anyone know which ereaders support soft hyphens and which don't? What happens on the ones that don't?

[ldolse]

I forget all the details, but there are a variety of issues with readers that don't support them (and most don't):

• Displays soft hyphens as question marks throughout the text
• Displays soft hyphens as hyphens throughout the text
• Breaks on soft hyphens as expected, but doesn't display hyphens anywhere, including the actual line/word breaks.

Example with ADE here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28108

And a laundry list of reading software here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28139

I'm not sure if Calibre always deletes them, it may be dependent on which conversion features you have enabled - I think if you enable heuristics they get removed, but otherwise may be kept. See here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57086

Another side effect is the soft hyphens will break text search in most (all?) ePub reading systems.

Further reading here:
http://infogridpacific.typepad.com/u...continued.html