Sigil: How to highlight text ?
 

Hi everybody,
Sigil is what I was looking for, THANKS!! But I can't find a tool to highlight text in at least one color. Is it possible to highlight text with Sigil?

Of course it is possible. You need to go to code view for that and create a style to represent the display as you would like (background and text color). Apply that style to the text you want to hightlight.

I don't think you'll find a "tool". But, in code view:

<p>this text is normal <span style="color:red">this text is red</span> this text is normal</p>

<p>this text is normal <span style="background:red">this text is black on red background</span> this text is normal</p>

<p>this text is normal <span style="color:yellow;background:red">this text is yellow on red background</span> this text is normal</p>

No guarantees how this will display on monochrome devices though! And some colour devices ignore highlighting completely.

While you are busy coloring your world, be thoughtful of your combinations of colors.

If any of your work is to be displayed on a non color device, please try to preview on a grayscale device. I just had a cover which I wanted to use, but its lettering in orange disappeared against a gray background when displayed on an e-ink reader.

If you study up a bit and create a class in the stylesheet for your desired color, then you can also create a clip, which will allow you to insert your color with just a right click. This is only worthwhile if you have a number to do.

These would be examples:
body {color:blue;}
h1 {color:#00ff00;}
h2 {color:rgb(255,0,0);}

.redtext {color:#ff0000}

You can find out more at:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_text.asp

need just a simple tool to highlight when I study the text
 

Thanks a lot for your help!
I was worryied that an answer like this would come up. Not possible for me, because I would need just a simple tool to highlight the text when I study the book. Has to be a quick and easy thing. But what I like on Sigil and didn't find anywhere else, is that I can delete easy any pictures and then the perfect printing options!!! But man, I need to highlight the text, underlining is not enought.
Any idea??

If CSS or inline styles and code editing are not possible for you, then Sigil's just not going to be the tool that quickly and easily does what you want. I don't really know of any WYSIWYG html editors capable of quickly/easily creating highlighted text (not to say there aren't any, of course) to tell the truth. That's always been more a function of the reading app/device rather than a creation-time feature.

You can bold it or underline it, or make it italic. Will that serve? They are all button options in Sigil.

Are you using Sigil as an eBook READER? It's an excellent epub editor, but not really designed for that job! If you read in, e.g. Adobe Digital Editions, you get more reading-oriented tools, including highlighting.

In Sigil, you can highlight temporarily by dragging across a section of text, or edit in a highlight as already described. Or maybe you could select a passage then assign one of the Header styles from the toolbar. h1 will be too big. h3 or h4 will oftem give bold text. Is this sufficient?

If you were feeling really ingenious you could go into the stylesheet and edit (say) h3 to be a highlighted style.

I got the impression the OP was using Sigil to delete images and otherwise "prepare" the text for printing and studying. Not actually reading it in Sigil. I could be wrong though.

Ok I see, maybe the software is not made for the regular user, but may I ask a simple question; even I try hard I don't understand why there are all kinds of awesome functions and plenty of buttoms for changing text to fat, cursiv, strikethrough and even low + high-positioned..., but missing out a simple buttom for just highlighting text for example in yellow?

"prepare" the text for printing and studying
 

Yes thats the purpose: "prepare" the text for printing and studying

I couldn't find any other software to do it perfectly like with Sigil and I tried them all (I guess). including Adobe.

If you only want sections of code, then maybe you ought to use a right click on any of the HTML files that make up the epub and open with a word processor which will provide the functionality you want.

prepare in Sigil and then copy and past it into word...
 

Ya, that will be the solution for me in the moment. I will prepare everything in Sigil and then just mark and copy the text I need and then paste it into word to keep working and hightlight text there. The printing then later on out of word isn't a problem, so that should do it.

:thanks:

-- Not certain how I managed to double post -- :o

Sigil's intended for the creation/editing of ePubs. Nothing more, nothing less. That's not to say you shouldn't use it for other purposes if it fits your needs, but quite frankly, there's no real pressing need to create ePubs with pre-highlighted text (colored backgrounds). I'm assuming any such highlighting would be very personal/subjective based on the person reading it. As I said, that's usually a function of the reading app/device. I can't think of any ePub I've read that was pre-highlighted in such a way. All the other formatting features are fairly commonplace in finished ePubs/HTML. The formatting buttons provided by Sigil are fairly common and consistent across all WYSYWIG HTML editors. As I said before; I don't personally know of any HTML editor that provides a button for such a feature.