Originally Posted by Hitch
@kiwidude:
I guess my perspective is different; every competent html editor (I mean the software, not the human operator) has a spellchecker already in it. My workflow, no matter the source material, is pretty simple stuff; we do all the primary editing in NoteTab Pro, which is probably the best html editor available, IMHO. I don't use it for merging and splitting, myself; but it has a clip editor that could probably do something equivalent--we used it to write a "clip" that converts epubs into mobi-ready epubs to drop on MobiGen/KG to create fully-compliant mobis. So I won't say it doesn't have merge/split; I simply don't know if it does. We run spellcheck in it BEFORE we export cleaned html to Sigil. I just don't see Sigil as a workhorse tool at this time; it's more of a finishing tool, IMHO. I don't care if someone's using it for one book or 100; my point about PCRE was about making it more of a workhorse and less of a finishing tool.
To me, adding a spellchecker in Sigil, and a hyperlink editor--both being freely and wonderfully well-done and available in html editors that run the gamut from free to cheap--seems like "another tool and complication in [our] workflow" that we certainly don't need. I like to see Sigil to those things that the fundamental, necessary tools can't--as opposed to reinventing the wheel by adding bells and whistles to Sigil that aren't actually necessary as they're widely available already. Sigil's regex is rough, and could use some work--and regex, or at LEAST, basic 'search and replace' is something that everyone who uses Sigil really uses, whether one is a dilettante or a commercial producer. Cleaning up a "bad OCR scan" is surely one of the best reasons to have PCRE, regardless of user-type.
And when you say, "open an epub directly," if you mean, in a WYSIWYG fashion, akin to Sigil--no. Even Bookbin is some whole other deal; but opening an epub in an html editor isn't difficult, and rezipping it is easy.
Would "spellcheck" be a nice addition? Sure. I think it sitting at the top of the next-in-line list is rather...frivolous, myself, but nobody asked me. Hyperlink editor? Again, handy, but...{shrug}. But a rock-solid regex would be nice. I get a lot of books back where a global change, for whatever reason, never changed that last item found, repeatedly--so I'd like the regex to be PCRE and reliable, and for 0.4x to be rock-solid, too, long before we get to niceties and/or what is essentially gingerbread.
BTW, FWIW, for anyone who doesn't want to work in html, or really use CSS, Jutoh has spell-check and you can split and merge "chapters" just as easily, if not easier than, Sigil (and it is pretty stable). I've played with it--I like to keep up on what's out there, and while it's not my personal kettle of fish (I always want to see what's behind the curtain), it works, pretty decently, to make epubs and mobis.
Not trying to be snarky, or what-have-you; just my $.02 and my perspective, and as Schember is the maintainer, it's his call--and he's already made it; you guys will get your spellchecker and your hyperlink editor. So, my whingeing isn't affecting anything, anyway.
Hitch
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