Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardenman
I happened to stumble on this thread. I thought I would add my 2 cents worth. First let me say I am not a coder. I am just an average man on the street
When ever epub books are discused everyone says go to Sigil and fix it if something is wrong. Noone ever says you have to know code to use Sigil. As JSWolf says we common people are led to think Sigil is WYSIWYG. When someone says go to Sigil and fix it please add that unless you know how to code you can only do the most bacis things with it.
Everyone is given to believe that anyone can use Sigil.
|
Gardenman:
That's because, as far as "epub editors" go, Sigil really is the ONLY game in town, unless you want to use significantly (and I mean, significantly) more expensive html editors, and even then, one still has to know how to create an ncx (yourself), an OPF (yourself), create the required metadata tags, etc.
With regard to "we common people," I taught myself to code, using first MBPC to learn the basics of Kindle bookmaking; then I took the tutorials at W3schools.com, for both CSS and HTML, and then I started to use Sigil. Before that, like the "common man," I knew how to use Word, Excel, and the usual, like MS Project, etc. I didn't have ANY coding background, other than having used WordPerfect, so I understood the concept of tag pairs. That's IT. No expensive classes, no fancy tutorials; all OS programs and some time. I was the ubiquitous average (wo)man on the street who received a Kindle for Xmas, and started making PG books into books for myself. Now I own a company that does this. So, anyone CAN use Sigil--the question is
whether they are willing to put their own time into learning how to use it.
Honestly, I don't "get" the whole "making an eBook should be a walk in the park" thing. I think it's Amazon's fault; they created a semi-proficient "upload-Word-and-get-a-sellable-if-not-wonderfully-formatted-book" platform, so now every Tom Dick and Harry who can key thinks that typing something in Word is the equivalent of making an eBook. Type--enter "The End"--upload to Amazon--kablammo, instant eBook. The fact that there are, literally, hundreds of thousands of badly-formatted, Word-to-MOBI files on Amazon doesn't seem to enter into the discussion, and I get VERY few prospective clients that have even bothered to download K4PC, or Previewer, or ADE and even familiarize themselves with what happens in an eBook. (For example: text reflowing. This seems to be an utterly alien concept, and literally, 80% of the Proof sheets we get will have comments like "move this paragraph to
the top of page X." Or font resizing). [/rant]
And Sigil IS "WYSIWYG," for
text editing. it is NOT WYSIWYG for fixing HTML, because essentially,
nothing is, (and how could it be?) and as far as ePUBs go, generally, the "WYG" is highly dependent upon the final device. Anyone who stumbles across this thread who has ever used Google's Blogger, which is allegedly a "WYSIWYG" html editor blogging platform, knows just how ridiculous that idea is; a WYSIWYG html editor, to fix the
coding, just doesn't work, IME. Most of the people who come in my door can't even fix paragraph alignments, indents, or styles in MS-WORD, which is as WYSIWYG as the day is long...so I don't know why anyone thinks it (WYSIWYG html editing) should be "doable" for the average Joe in Sigil.
However, @user_none, perhaps the "description" should be changed, so that people aren't mistakenly attempting to use Sigil as Jutoh. I know that neither Valloric nor you intended it to be, and this discussion may have some relevance to the "man on the street," vis-a-vis the description, if nothing more. {Shrug}.
Hitch