Named entities and French books

[Francois_C]

Maybe this small issue does not exist only in French.
In French typography, we must put unbreakable spaces before these punctuation marks: ;:!?» and after «
All "double" marks need a space. So we cannot remove   and replace it with a plain space as it was an unwanted named entity, if we want to avoid having a semicolon or a closing double quote at the beginning of a line.
An option to exclude some named entities from being filtered should be introduced into the editor.
Thanks.
François.

[kovidgoyal]

The editor does not replace   with a plain space, it replaces it with the unicode nbsp character. As you will see if you look at the bottom right of the screen with your cursor to the right of the character.

[Francois_C]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The editor does not replace   with a plain space, it replaces it with the unicode nbsp character. As you will see if you look at the bottom right of the screen with your cursor to the right of the character.

Thank you very much, Kovid. This is great. I did not look at the bottom right, nor checked the binary, indeed. I only saw spaces, which I now understand are displayed like non-breakable spaces in LibreOffice. So I'll be able to use the feature now
Congratulations for the great job!

[Francois_C]

BTW, when you edit the processed file with Sigil, it displays   again; which I suppose means that it will restore   when saving, because it cannot handle the equivalent Unicode char.
But I suppose Calibre editor will replace Sigil shortly.

[mrmikel]

It can be a little hard to find and select non-breaking spaces.

You can search for them by setting search to Regex and type \u00a0 in Find.

[arspr]

Or using the new insert special character tool (look in the main tool bar) which also works inside the F&R input text boxes.

[mrmikel]

Originally Posted by arspr

Or using the new insert special character tool (look in the main tool bar) which also works inside the F&R input text boxes.

Absolutely! As you mouse across the characters displayed, you get a readout of the description and the unicode number for it in the lower left corner of the box.

[Francois_C]

Thank you everybody. I'll use the search and replace and Regex tips when I need them. Now I'm using the 'replace named entities' feature confidently. It made me find that Sigil did not support Unicode characters (at least for the   equivalent, which is brought back to named entity if you save the file), whilst Amanuensis did.
I think this editing tool is really interesting and useful. But I would like to know which proportion of the innumerable Calibre users can use it: In France, I assume that one ebook user upon two uses Calibre, as a rule of thumb. But most of them totally ignore HTML (and Regex!). Thank you for those who are able to use the new feature. I like this in Calibre: it is not made 'for noobs', but it can be used by noobs with results they find satisfactory