In trying to find the character "0xfeff" I've learned a few interesting things about Lyx's find and replace.
---At least in some cases 0xfeff is the opening quotation character for some word processors. ---When imported into Lyx this character is converted into code. For example these foreign quotation marks around the word "simplicity" look like this when opened in a text editor: \begin_inset Quotes eld \end_inset simplicity \begin_inset Quotes erd \end_inset So, unlike regular Lyx quotation marks, for these foreign quotation marks what is shown on screen and what is found in the source code in a Lyx file is completely different. ---The way I discovered this is that I noticed one of these foreign quotation marks in the Lyx file. It is smaller then the Lyx quotation marks. But when I copied that quotation character into the Lyx find window it failed to find the character in the file. INSTEAD Lyx converts the character into a normal Lyx quotation character and that is what is found. So, the Lyx find and replace feature is not useful in this situation---it would be very helpful if this were fixed! Therefore, I looked at the file using Emacs and discovered the above code. ---So, I decided to try to use the find and replace in Emacs. This also did not work because changing 0xfeff to " globally messes up a bunch of boxes (probably 50 or more) which I placed in the file using Lyx. I have already edited the whole file (a book) in Lyx getting it into the proper format and trying to manually replace any foreign looking characters. Obviously, I have missed at least one (actually I know there are many) as the file still cannot be converted to pdf. I then tried to search through the file manually, but still failed as the situation proved to be even more complex than I thought, and more complex than I have time to explain right now. Lou
