[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jim Chaffin

It appears that Sigil saves all work only as ePub data. Perhaps I'm very old school and I know I'm pretty dense but I find it extremely mystifying trying to use Sigil.

First, it crashed on me on about the 10th chapter! No problem, I've been saving manually for every one, I'll simply reopen all those 'chapter' files. Uhmn, where are they?! Nothing but '.epub' files on my drives. Why weren't the originals saved? They are simply text files, pure ASCII, probably.

Are you saying you were creating the html files in Sigil? You didn't have them created already? Sigil isn't like iBooks author--it's not really a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG editor. It's an ePUB editor. It doesn't save in html, xhtml, xml, or any other format--it only saves ePUBs. Just as, with iBooks Author, you would drag-and-drop something from Pages, or a PDF that you already had on your Mac, so that if Author crashed, you'd still have the source files, the very same thing is true of Sigil. I don't think--I don't presume to speak for user_none--that anyone really thinks of it as a place to create html files.

I create all my xhtml files in a text editor, and then simply add them to Sigil as needed, using Sigil to create the final ePUB. I mean, that's the entire answer--Sigil only saves ePUBs, that's it. It doesn't save any html files separately. It saves them as part of the ePUB it's making. If you want to see the html files, you can either explode the ePUB, as Ducky told you, and view the html files that way, or obviously, within Sigil, or you can use ePUB_tweak to see them in their "native state," so to speak.

Of course, the file(s) that were open when the crash occurred are none existent now, nothing left but an .epub that won't open. Lesson learned, I'm now saving copies via BBEdit!

OK, I start the process over completely. Fortunately, I used iBooks Publisher to create the first version so I already have an iBook, txt and PDF version to play with. I used the PDF to copy stuff into Sigil.

I won't speak to copying stuff from a PDF into an xhtml editor. PDF is positively the worst possible source material for an ePUB, although I suppose if you want to copy and paste a book paragraph by paragraph into code view, it could be done. Man, sounds laborious, though. If you already have an ePUB for iBooks, why not just copy THAT code and then clean it all up (and, hoy, will there be some cleaning!). It would still probably be faster than trying to copy and paste from a PDF, I'd think.

Now, I don't have time to finish this in one sitting. So I save it for the hundredth time and Quit Sigil. Now, even without a crash, there are still no files other than those needed for an ePub. Why not? OK, I'll try opening the ePub document just created in Sigil and see if that will get all my data, css, TOC, etc back for new editing.

Well, sorta. The list of 'chapter' files are displayed in the side panel and so is the TOC. But Sigil opened a new window with nothing but the standard template. Where is the menu that let's me view/edit any of the previous work?!

Hmmm? What do you mean? I don't think I understand what you mean--you just OPEN the ePUB that you saved. Right click your ePUB, and click "open with...Sigil." That's it. There aren't any other files. They are all inside the zipped ePUB.

Perhaps it's some control/right-click command, the app seems to be ported from some COBOL mainframe...

Frankly, I don't see a reason to use Sigil over a read X?HTML editor like BBEdit or even TextWrangler. At least ones files would be safe in another format!

Well, then, with all due respect, don't use it. If you're doing great with a "real" XHTML editor like BBEdit or TextWrangler--and I'm not being snarky--why use Sigil, indeed? It seems redundant. The files are safe. Maybe the part that is causing you frustration is that you seem to think that an ePUB is somehow extruded from source files--that an ePUB is created by these source files, separate and apart from them. It's not. The ePUB is the source files, and they should all be there. I can't speak to why you're having myriad crashes--I find it incredibly stable, and the latest release is rock-solid, AFAIK. Maybe it's a Mac thing, or, possibly, it's the paste-from-PDF, but I'm guessing. User_none or meme may be able to better answer, although, without any explanation as to what's happening around the crashes, I don't know what they'll be able to tell you.

Unlike most Mac programs, when you open Sigil, it opens a blank slate. It does not auto-magically open to whatever you were last working upon. You simply have to do the usual File-->Open and navigate in Finder to wherever you saved your file, OR, on the File dropdown, you should see the file you were working on. That's all.

Do I sound frustrated/irritated or worse? That just may be because I am. I've never seen a less intuitive app for such a simple process. ePub building doesn't require C++!

I suppose there are tutorials somewhere but the only ones I've found just repeat the extreme basics. I've found absolutely nothing about actually using the app that would require more than a hours work.

I'd appreciate anyone having the time to answer my obviously super-simple questions.

Well, they certainly seem so, and I believe that the issue is that you just don't understand the very essentials of ePUB. As I said, Sigil isn't a program, like, say, Calibre, where you put stuff in one end of the sausage-making machine and something new and different pops out the other; you put your files into the software and that IS the ePUB. That's it. Think of Sigil like a Legos building. The building isn't created, and the legos that went into it left sitting in the box--the building IS the Legos. Same exact thing. You want to see the HTML or CSS files, whatever? Just open them IN Sigil, in Codeview. Or, if for whatever reason, that doesn't make you happy, explode the ePUB and view them with BBEdit. But really, there's no need. You just click CodeView in Sigil and look at the html there. I mean, you said that ePUB building is simple, in your post, so maybe you would be better off sticking with the programs you know, like BBEdit. I mean--hell, don't make it harder on yourself, right?

That's all I know to tell you. user_none or meme will have to address the crashing issues, particularly as I never work in BookView. Honestly, I can't imagine copy-and-pasting a PDF into Sigil, I really can't. I think you'd be better off using the HTML from the iBooks Author program.

HTH,
Hitch