[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

That is the crux of the issue for user none. He does have full time job writing payment system software, and Sigil got to be just too much. It appears he was willing to do people a favor, but not give up everything else in his life in the bargain.

Yes. I write software for a living as well, but not in Python, and not using GUI frameworks. Last time I created a GUI was in Visual Studio (drag and drop), that called the business logic in a DLL. It was a simple GUI as well; just a menu, some windows, and a button here and there.

Completely studying up on QT, EPUB, and all libraries Sigil is currently using to take over the program from user_none is too much work for me. I'm not willing to spend that effort.

I think the key is for our "white knight" to find some software already out there that will handle 70% of the job, so it isn't necessary to re-invent everything in the editor. It would only be necessary to trim and tuck here and there on the editor and add particular epub features and necessities.

Inheriting from QT's text editor component (user_none says it's QPlainTextEdit) already gets the basic editor in place, and "just" needs extension, which can be done in Python rather than in C++.

Also, Calibre already supports a lot of stuff, such as exploding and packing EPUBs (Tweak Book), embedding metatada (Calibre itself), TOC Editor (recently added), so all of that does not have to be re-written anymore.

I may not be a white knight yet, but I may become a grey one, exactly because of this.

If something like that can be found, it would reduce development and support time. It is the follow up and support that is the crux of the issue. For editing epub2, we can live with existing Sigil. As little as some of us like it, epub3 will be a larger and larger issue as time goes by and this version ought to handle epub3 and epub2 both without requiring a total rewrite.

Building a Sigil-like editor into Calibre at this time is one of the best things one could do, because if/when Calibre gets to support EPUB3 as input/output, it (almost) automatically supports it in this new editor. The functionality to explode and pack EPUB3 files in Calibre can be re-used for the editor, and the editor itself only needs to be extended, not rewritten.

Calibre will be transformed to some sort of "Adobe Lightroom of e-books". If you don't know Lightroom: it does with RAW image files what Calibre does with e-books, but it also contains facilities for editing these RAW image files. (And then, export them to JPG or other formats.)

The only downside is that people who *only* need an editor, also get an entire library manager with it, or people who want a library manager get an editor too. Same with Lightroom; there are people that use only the editor part, by temporarily importing RAWs into Lightroom, and removing them after they're done, but there are also people that use Lightroom as a library, and edit the RAWs in a different editor because they like that editor better.

I don't see this as a problem, if the editor part of Calibre is contained within its own form. Calibre already contains stuff I don't use (the Content Server for example), but it's not in the way, so I'm not bothered by it being there.