How to make Sigil live

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Splitting and merging is not very important when fixing stuff, but it is when creating books from scratch.

Clearly you've never encountered and epub that was divided up horrendously--if at all? I'm mainly a fixer myself, and I can assure you, an ePub editor with no split/merge functionality would be nearly worthless for my fixing/tweaking/editing needs.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Clearly you've never encountered and epub that was divided up horrendously--if at all?

Not ones that I bought, no. (And the classics from Feedbooks and B&N are also perfectly formatted and divided, except for some stuff that I change because it's not to my taste.) I've encountered many problems, but never bad splitting; not even once. With regard to epubs that weren't divided at all, I've never encountered them either. Not the ones I get from stores, that is.

I'm mainly a fixer myself, and I can assure you, an ePub editor with no split/merge functionality would be nearly worthless for my fixing/tweaking/editing needs.

Hm, ok. Have you seen this problem with a particular publisher? In that case, I may want to avoid them

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by Perkin

When fixing editing epubs, one of the most often uses of Sigil for me (apart from quick spelling mistake edits) is having the handy ability to split and merge, keeping track and updating all the file/link references without Sigil would be a nightmare.

This! As an epub maker, I do lots of splits and merges. The bookkeeping Sigil does in the background is every bit as important to me as the bookkeeping it does with the TOC/NCX/OPF files.

And on another issue, I myself could easily do without a WYSIWYG editor. Since the advent of the previewer, I work almost exclusively in code view. I like to see what's going on. (In fairness, there are those who use sigil to compose their ebooks, and some of them use the book view like a word processor. These folks would probably be most displeased if book view were dropped. Whereas I am merely converting existing word processor output into epub format.)

[kovidgoyal]

Splitting and merging is trivial to implement. Splitting code already exists in calibre during conversions, it would be easy to adapt it, the only difference being that instead of automatically finding split points, we let the user specify them.

This is the major advantage of re-writing things within calibre, lots of code to do common ebook related tasks already exists and is either ready to use or can be easily adapted given the dynamic nature of python.

However, we are still waiting for someone to commit to building an editor component, with or without WYSIWYG. I think that we should start with code view + preview and worry about WYSIWYG later, but that is upto whoever writes the code.

[Perkin]

Perhaps a 'possible future feature - programmer wanted' topic should be put in the calibre forum?

[roger64]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Clearly you've never encountered and epub that was divided up horrendously--if at all? I'm mainly a fixer myself, and I can assure you, an ePub editor with no split/merge functionality would be nearly worthless for my fixing/tweaking/editing needs.

I totally agree with DiapDealer. I had to use this feature many times and I am very happy I can do it so conveniently with Sigil.

[EowynCarter]

I'm not sure about the calibre. Right, some nice to have feature in calibre. But about all the sigil code ? What about people not using calibre ?

I'll have a look at epubopentoolbox. Too bad, no easy install / download. But i'm a java dev, I should be able to get it working

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Splitting and merging is trivial to implement. Splitting code already exists in calibre during conversions, it would be easy to adapt it, the only difference being that instead of automatically finding split points, we let the user specify them.

This is the major advantage of re-writing things within calibre

Ah, yes... We should also give it an email client, browser, word processor, file manager and then tack some Linux stuff on it to make it boot on its own

However, we are still waiting for someone to commit to building an editor component, with or without WYSIWYG. I think that we should start with code view + preview and worry about WYSIWYG later, but that is upto whoever writes the code.

So it would be best to start out by creating a derivative of QPlainTextEdit, and then extending it, in Python? I'm willing to try it, but as I have no experience with Python, QT and Calibre, I am unable to predict how fast I will be. Very slow, no doubt, at least in the beginning.

Can I have a second instance of Calibre (copy the folder?) so I can write code for that, without crashing my normal install?

[kovidgoyal]

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/develop.html

Simply set the environment variable to develop and unset it to run normal calibre.

[mrmikel]

Hitch could you list your must haves and serious wants so that if someone is interested in this they have some idea of the important tasks? As you said, creators have a different set of needs than fixers. I expect there are more fixer users, and many hobbyists. But you depend on it for a living which in my book moves you to the head of line.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Hitch could you list your must haves and serious wants so that if someone is interested in this they have some idea of the important tasks? As you said, creators have a different set of needs than fixers. I expect there are more fixer users, and many hobbyists. But you depend on it for a living which in my book moves you to the head of line.

I think, if the needs for a creator are all implemented, you'll probably have everything implemented for fixers as well. I expect a fixer to use a subset of the features that a creator needs.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I think, if the needs for a creator are all implemented, you'll probably have everything implemented for fixers as well. I expect a fixer to use a subset of the features that a creator needs.

maybe not -
"fixers" get involved with badly formatted/badly converted books from all sorts of sources. e.g. old/poor quality scans of material that was never released as epub; material that is given away in web page formats but not as actual books.... such as fan fiction...
"creators" don't start from the same place. If they don't produce bad formatting to begin with, they have no need for "fix-it" tools

[Katsunami]

What tools do you think a fixer uses that a creator has no need of?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What tools do you think a fixer uses that a creator has no need of?

WYSIWYG formatting.
What Sigil does not allow is attaching the 'style' buttons to the CSS (class)

In addition: The style toolbar buttons need to be Publishing house /User (de)populated.

eg. Publisher supplies a 'House' stylesheet and a 'House' toolbar. The user can hide (unneeded) buttons (but not change their assigned function,or the stylesheet).


Working in BV needs to be able to fully replace style (current is a sort of 'Merge style: focus on a line: clicking any h# or P retains the class originally assigned and just flips the outer tag)

The typical 'Creator' as seen here at MR appears to not want to get down and dirty with the code.

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

I'm not sure about the calibre. Right, some nice to have feature in calibre. But about all the sigil code ? What about people not using calibre ?

I'll have a look at epubopentoolbox. Too bad, no easy install / download. But i'm a java dev, I should be able to get it working

Let us know what you think!

Albert