Search & Replace not working properly

[raghiid]

I use calibre's search & replace feature to enable ligatures in the book (fi, fl) and they work great, but sometimes, within a book there are some fi's and fl's that are not replaced by their ligature glyph, as if calibre skipped over them. What's wrong here?

I'm using calibre 3.48 (last version supported by my mac) and convert to azw3 and I use the "hyphenate this" plugin.

[kovidgoyal]

if you use hyphenate this then there will be hyphens between some chanracters. Your search expression needs to take that into account.

[raghiid]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

if you use hyphenate this then there will be hyphens between some chanracters. Your search expression needs to take that into account.

How do I do this? Right now, all I have calibre replace are the fi & fl glyphs.

[kovidgoyal]

Your search expression needs to include an optional soft hyphen character. Or alternately use the polish books tool first, to remove the soft hyphens, do your search replace and then put them back using polish books or hyphenate this if you prefer.

[raghiid]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Your search expression needs to include an optional soft hyphen character.

How do I do this part? Since I don't want any extra steps like the Polish Book feature.
I appreciate your help man!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by raghiid

How do I do this part? Since I don't want any extra steps like the Polish Book feature.

The Hyphenate This! plugin is inserting a soft hyphen character in every location in each word where the hyphenation rules say a word can be split. That means for a search to match a word, it needs a soft hyphen character in each spot. And, you should make it optional in case you have done some editing and accidentally removed it.

Personally, it makes a lot more sense to remove the hyphenation and only run Hyphenate This! on the book after you have finished editing the book. It should be one of the last steps in your book processing.

[kovidgoyal]

f\u00ad?i

[raghiid]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The Hyphenate This! plugin is inserting a soft hyphen character in every location in each word where the hyphenation rules say a word can be split. That means for a search to match a word, it needs a soft hyphen character in each spot. And, you should make it optional in case you have done some editing and accidentally removed it.

Personally, it makes a lot more sense to remove the hyphenation and only run Hyphenate This! on the book after you have finished editing the book. It should be one of the last steps in your book processing.

Oddly, I've found that if I hyphenate before converting to azw3, the page count that calibre inserts does not show up in the book.

[raghiid]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

f\u00ad?i

Kovid my friend, you are spoon feeding me snippets of the solution in three posts! And I still don't get it.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by raghiid

Oddly, I've found that if I hyphenate before converting to azw3, the page count that calibre inserts does not show up in the book.

That seems to support my recommendation to do the hyphenation last Get the book right, convert to AZW3 and then run the Hyhpenate This! plugin on the AZW3 version only. Though I don't know if that can be done as I don't use the plugin. I remember trying it and found it caused more problems than it solved.

As to Kovid's short reply, that was the search string to find all an occurrence of "f" followed by a soft-hyphen (using the unicode value for the character) and then an "i". Put that into the the find field, change the mode to "Regex" and press the find button. That will find the problem.

If what you want to do is remove all the occurrences of "fl" and "fi" with a soft-hyphen in the middle, you could use the search:

(f)\u00ad([il])

With replace:

\1\2

And again in Regex mode. Either do a find and then replace, or use "Replace all" to do it in one go.

Of course, if the Hyphenate This! plugin is putting a hyphen between these characters it could be a bug in that plugin. Maybe you should ask the plugin's author about this.

[raghiid]

Really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Unfortunately, I still haven't figured it out. Some ligatures are working, and some aren't, I will have to live with that.

Thanks!