Sigil displaying WYSIWYG oddly
 

Sigil is excellent, especially for something still in very early release stages. I'm just grinding through cleaning up a bunch of epub conversions and it's doing most things really well. Unfortunately when I tried to report a bug I discovered that you require me to have a google account for that. I want not to have one. So instead I'm going to report bugs here.

Sigil on my WinXP laptop has started displaying WYSIWYG oddly, and the CSS header is breaking. I've restarted Sigil (but not the laptop) and the problem presists. It happens for any epub file, not just the one I was editing when the problem started. When I switch to code view I see the header like so:
Viz, I'm missing the
Section that delinates the Sigil parts.

But since the first time I got that, I can't not have it. Starting sigil, open a random epub, it's there. The effect is that images are resized to nearly full screen and the text is very large.

I can't see anything other than executable files in the "program files" directory, so I assume that somewhere there's a stash of information that's been corrupted. I closed Sigil, deleted the contents of "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Sigil\scratchpad" and restarted without effect. Uninstalling and reinstalling also had no effect, but interestingly my modified startup menu shortcut was re-created when I reinstalled (it starts in my books folder instead of "program files\sigil" - any chance you can make that "my documents" or something?)

Currently I can no longer use Sigil, since this fault makes it unusable. Do I need to manually delete stuff out of the registry or delete a template file? Any tips would be much appreciated.

thanks
moz

I don't require it. Google requires it. As far as I'm concerned, you shouldn't have to create one.

If it's because you choose not to create a Google Account, then that's fine. Just create a new thread for each problem then.

To tell you the truth, I don't understand what your issue really is. You see large images and text. How is this connected to Sigil's CSS header? Or to put it in other words, why do you think it is?

Please provide more information. Start from the beginning, and explain everything in detail.

OK, now when I load an epub in the Calibre reader, or previously when I loaded it in Sigil the text was small (perhaps 12pt) and the images displayed at whatever their native size is. The problem is that now when I load an epub in Sigil the images are scaled up and the text is about 30pt. On a 1024 pixel wide Sigil window I get about 5 words per line and there doesn't seem to be a way to change that (image here). By comparison Calibre opens the exact same file with reasonable defaults.

Based on the Sigil XHTML view showing a changed "don't change this" section, I think that's the problem. But regardless, I'd like to be able to change it back. There doesn't seem to be anything useful in the registry, nor in the assortment of file locations that I've checked. So how do I change back to the way it was when I first installed it?

At the risk of adding extraneous detail, I've been doing a fair bit of large-scale editing - take a full novel with HTML next/prev links on every page, and use regex replacement to strip them out. Which at times involves clipboard copying the whole thing into my text editor of choice, using a regex engine I know, then pasting it back in to Sigil. I'm very used to the 100% cpu pause while Sigil loads, saves or changes view mode :) Sometime in the middle of that Sigil lost the plot as above. I can zip up and send you files or whatever, let me know what you need.

thanks
moz

When in Book View, look at the zoom controls at the bottom. Does it say 100%? If it doesn't, zoom it down to 100%.

I still don't know what you mean by the changed "don't change this" section. I know what you're referring to, but I can assure you it's not the cause of your problem. That section never changes unless the user does it himself. Tidy can perhaps merge those CSS styles into other CSS style tags, but the styles themselves are the same.

Again, it's not causing the large text/image size. The zoom mode is. It's the only thing that can enlarge both the images and the text.

And if you want to know, Sigil stores its settings in the registry, under HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Strahinja Markovic/Sigil. Just delete that folder and you'll have a "fresh" installation. Deleting this folder will also reset any stored zoom settings, but as I've said, you can always change it with the controls at the bottom of the window.

Try not to paste rich text directly into Sigil. Always import it. The reason is that Webkit takes over the pasting functionality and it's hard to work around this behavior. So export everything to HTML and then import it into Sigil.

And copying an entire novel worth of text onto the clipboard and pasting that somewhere? A horrible idea for any text editor. On Windows, all of that text will be UTF-16 on the clipboard and take up 30MB+ for an average novel. Parsing all of that on the fly...

Import that text, don't paste it.

That was easy. Thanks. A little playing reveals the cause - why have you linked CTRL-home and CTRL-end to that zoom control? Every other editor on Windows maps those to start/end of document. And what's the "100% view" shortcut?

Um, the "import" function... where is that? I know it's mentioned in the FAQ as well as here, but there doesn't seem to be a menu item or toolbar button labelled "import". Do you mean dropping a file into the program, as it seems to accept epub files (doesn't display them or include them that I can see, but the document gets marked as changed)?

No, I didn't. CTRL-Home and CTRL-End do exactly what you say they should do: start/end of document.

CTRL-(plus) and CTRL-(minus) on the other hand, zoom in and out. Standard keyboard shortcuts for zoom controls.

Open the View menu and you'll see them written next to the command name.

Actually that's a pretty good idea.

"Import" means open a document. So just go to File->Open and open an HTML file.

Hmm, there's some odd stuff going on with my setup and keyboard shortcuts then. If I set focus to the zoom control home/end zoom all the way, but setting focus to anything else and ctrl-home/end grab it.

Import... perhaps you should change the FAQ to say "open" rather than "import". Or add a new function - import a document into the existing document. What I was expecting was that import lets us open an epub with metadata and (say) a TOC, then import the separate chapters as HTML files into the already-open epub. By the sound of it Sigil doesn't support that except via copy'n'paste. What I've been doing is conceptually similar, except with the whole novel in one hit. Being able to export the text as HTML, play with it, then import it back into the epub skeleton would be handy.