[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What does it matter, if functionality similar to Sigil's will end up in Calibre, and that it is not a seperate program? You can just create a "Workspace" library, import you texts in there, and open them in the editor. Then work with them as you would with Sigil itself. Instead of opening the file from your desktop, you'd open it from your workplace library.

Assuming that somebody decides to step up and do all the heavy lifting on the editor, and it works as you've described.

It's the same approach as Lightroom takes for pictures, and it works very well there. There are a lot of people who use Lightroom as a library only, as a photo editor only, or both, myself included. There is no reason that Calibre cannot be used in the same way.

I'm not familiar with Lightroom. Can't speak to that.

While I understand the apprehension against this approach (it does yield some sort of "hybrid" program, half of which is not useful for the task you intend to do), there are also a lot of advantages. Any improvement in Calibre's EPUB2 / EPUB3 support will automatically be available in the editor (or with relatively little changes) as it uses the same input/output plugins. Any improvement in a function in Calibre that impacts the editor in some way, such as metadata editing, will automatically be an improvement in the editor. Coding in Python will be much faster and much more productive than in C++, yielding much faster bugfixes and more rapid implementation of requested functionality.

This is all theoretical. Again, I'm not particularly trying to be negative, but Kovid's userbase has different goals than I do, myself. Many of the Calibre users are making books for themselves, or converting/cleaning PD books, or...well, other stuff. I'm not saying that what they're doing is "bad" or not as important, or any other spin; I'm simply saying, my prognostications as to the direction that a Sigil-add-in will take, for Calibre users, is likely to be different than the direction I'd go, assuming arguendo I had those type of resources. I mean, hell, I could be completely wrong, but....I'm pretty sure that somewhere around here, if I looked hard enough, I could find an archived post from me saying "sometime within 2 years, we'll be looking for a new maintainer..." and here we are. (NO reflection whatsoever on User_none, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty; Sigil is an amazing product today, compared to what it was when he took over. AH-MAZING.)

I think that the chances of a calibre-hosted editor catching up with Sigil, and eventually overtaking it at some point are MUCH better than finding someone willing to look into EPUB2/EPUB3 coding, the BOOST library, QT in C++, and so on, just to maintain and extend a seperate program for a very small niche of people.

I wouldn't disagree with that statement. I think I've said much the same in my prior posts either on this thread or the other--don't remember which. There's always going to be a larger market for a product like Calibre than a product like Sigil, that's a given.

Hitch