Dear Sigil community,
Very happy to hear about the recent developments with Sigil! One of the inconveniences I have encountered is the lack of EPUB3 support and I am very happy to see this underway. I now have only one item left on my wish list, and that is to work on unzipped EPUB’s directly.
There is already an issue on the (now read-only) Google Code tracker:
https://code.google.com/p/sigil/issues/detail?id=1641
I wondered whether it would be a good idea to add this future to the Sigil roadmap?
The commenters on Google Code already explain the advantages of such an approach.
Firstly, this approach is necessary to work with versioning systems like Git and SVN. These systems allow to track and exchange the changes to files over time. They work much better with series of text files (like an unzipped EPUB) than with single binary files (like a zipped EPUB).
Secondly, having the EPUB accessibly through the filesystem allows to easily perform specific hacks for which Sigil does not yet have a user interface. For exmple, adding the com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file for iBooks.
Finally, access through the filesystem allows to use any other tool directly on your publication. For instance, using your favourite photo-editor to directly edit the images in your EPUB.
Other tools in the EPUB ecosystem, like Readium and epubcheck have already started to support working with unzipped folders.
What do you think?
Is such an option feasible and desirable?
Looking forward to your replies,
Eric