[Doitsu]

I wasn't surprised by the mostly negative feedback that I received, however, what still puzzles me is the large number of followers of "pure doctrine" who kept repeating the mantra "Sigil is an ePub editor" and more or less said that even considering enhancements to support other formats borders on heresy and would surely screw up Sigil without giving any technical reasons.
I had expected more of a "hacker mentality." I.e. a keen interest in tweaking and enhancing existing tools by adding new useful features that would make life simpler for many people.
One could almost get the impression that anybody who doesn't create ePubs deserves to get punished for choosing a "lesser format."

Originally Posted by Hitch

Why screw up Sigil, a smashingly good epub tool, when it takes 30 seconds to drag a properly-crafted ePUB onto Previewer, which you'll have to use anyway to test the book on multiple devices, assuming you don't have an iPad, a Kindle, a K-3, a Fire, a Droid tablet, and iPhone, etc.?

Passing on a file name to a command line tool and executing it in the background won't significanlty change Sigil nor likely screw it up. Why force users to run a resource-hungry full-blown GUI program when a command line tool will do?

Originally Posted by Hitch

It's a tool for people who regularly work in html, xhtml, css and regex.

That's what I like about it and what I use it for, also. (I don't use Scrivener, JUTOH, Atlantis Word Processor etc. and I hardly ever edit anything in WYSIGWYG mode.)

Originally Posted by Hitch

We use a wide number, but primarily, if you're using Word, your path invariably is Word-->good html editor (like NoteTab Pro, my own fave)-->Sigil. From Sigil, if you want a MOBI, you can use Calibre if you wish, or KindleGen. Not sure what the other two programs would be, but those four pretty much cover the gamut.

I certainly don't use 6 tools. My main problem is that it's not possible to directly convert ePubs with Kindlegen, because they don't contain an inline TOC. (I could use Calibre, but since I often got unexpected and undesired results I prefer Kindlegen.) This means I have to unzip the ePub file, extract the ncx file, and generate an inline TOC from the ncx file.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, for that matter, if someone doesn't want to make their own inline TOC's, they can either use Calibre, again, or use "epubfixer," altho I find the latter very unintuitive.

So why force people to use "epubfixer" or other homemade solutions??

Originally Posted by Hitch

I can virtually guarantee that user_none certainly won't implement a Magic KindleGen Maker Bullet into Sigil anytime soon, and certainly not while Amazon holds mobi as proprietary. It's just not his bag, as we oldsters used to say.

It's funny that you (and many others) stressed that mobi is a proprietary format. This is only true for binary files created by Kindlegen (and Calibre).
Mobi source files are well-documented and almost identical to ePub files; without looking at the html header, only experts would be able to tell at a glance whether a certain html source file is from an ePub or a mobi project.
Besides, Sigil supports several proprietary ePub extensions introduced by Adobe for ADE. If full standards compliance were a priority, it should refuse to open ePubs with ADE extensions.

Originally Posted by huebi

Well, if it can be easily implemented, why dont you download the source and implement it by yourself?

I already created my own scripts and creating a fork for just one or two features would be overkill.