Usefull Characters
 

Before I raised these as enhancements I thought I'd run it by the forum to get an idea on the feasability/usefulness of these.

Em dashes - Would be nice to have an option to insert an em dash into the file in WYSIWYG as this is used in numerous books of mine and there doesn't seem an easy option to include it in Sigil other than entering the — code for it directly in the code view.

Smart quotes - It would also be nice to be able to add smart quotes instead of normal quote marks in WYSIWYG (both single and double).

Replace all normal quotes with smart quotes - If you are going to replace all the normal quote marks (both single and double) with smart qoutes, then an option to replace all at once would be a huge benefit from having to examine every sentence.

You can always use the character map tool of your OS.

True, but it is a bit cumbersome to do it that way. I normally create all the different type of these special characters I need in a word doc and then just copy and paste where neccesary. Having this all in the same program would be much easier.

As we are trying to create ebooks that have the same "look & feel" as paper books, I thought it might be useful to include them somehow in Sigil.

Jellby put it nicely. Sigil supports Unicode, so just copy/paste the character from your OS's character map. Adding a character map to Sigil would be redundant.

You would be surprised how difficult it is to automate this correctly. For instance, quotes are not always balanced: sometimes when a character's speech spans multiple paragraphs, they all start with a quote, but only the last one ends with it. There are other exceptions too.

Some time ago a few experienced book producers told me this usually needs to be done manually.

Fair enough then, I won't bother raising this as enhancements then.

option/shift/- works well on Mac OS X. And option/- for en-dash.

I still appreciate the intention. The community is the key to the success of any open source application, and Sigil is no different. Some amazing ideas have come from enhancement requests on the tracker and discussions in this sub-forum—not to mention 95% of the bug reports—and I hope this will continue.