Replacement Character Frustration

[amo48]

How do you get Sigil to display soft hyphens and apostrophes, instead of the infamous "replacement character" (question mark in a black box)?

When I encounter this in documents I want to edit, I've just been going in, deleting the question mark and putting in the appropriate character. But this is tedious.

What am I doing wrong in trying to convert my .txt file to .epub via Sigil?

O

[Doitsu]

I've never seen the infamous "replacement character", but my guess would be that your text has an unusual encoding. Can you post a small sample file that exhibits this behavior and describe how exactly you added the file?

[Toxaris]

In the current release it is difficult to remove the soft hyphens. Find a location where you know is one. In code view move your cursor around that spot. You will notice at one moment that your cursor will not move although you pressed the button. There is where the soft-hyphen is. Select it (shift and press arrow the other way) and copy it. With the S&R you can now past it and replace it by nothing.
For apostrophes, most use a single (curly) quote like ’

[amo48]

Below is an excerpt from an article I converted from a .pdf file to a .txt file--using the Windows text editor Notepad. I then opened it in Sigil in order to apply the XHTML coding. At points in the document, Sigil displays the so-called "replacement character" (in Unicode, U+FFFD), which is a white question mark inside a black diamond, because it does not recognize the soft hyphen or the apostrophe. As I now look at this pasted-in excerpt in my browser (Internet Explorer) while writing this reply, I notice that the replacement character isn't a question mark in a black diamond, but shows up as a blank box. So I guess the question is one of encoding the text file prior to saving it. What should it be before opening it in Sigil. Will this solve the problem?

Or does it relate to whatever program is opening the file?



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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: FREE NOTES PLOT STRUCTURE ANALYSIS

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen creates a picture of the small, cocooned world of the middle class gentry -- with their commonplace joys and their commonplace sorrows. The central concern of this "comedy of manners" is Mrs. Bennet�s dogged efforts to find suitable husbands for her eldest daughters. Of course, Mrs. Bennet�s judgements cannot be trusted, for she is a nagging wife, an ineffectual mother, and a social misfit throughout the novel. Her repeated and continued foolishness is one of the things that holds the plot together into a unified whole.

The plot�s focus on marriage is seen from the very beginning of the story. The arrival of Mr. Bingley, �a single man of large fortune� at near-by Netherfield immediately fires the imagination of ....

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[amo48]

So Sorry! I've found out the problem. Saved the .txt file in ANSI, which is the Windows default. Re-saved in UTF-8 and now, no problem.

As Rosanne Roseannadanna (Gilda Radner) says:

"Never mind!"