Back to Sigil Features and why we compose in Sigil
DiapDealer said:
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But the other revelation was that someone would actually use Sigil to compose books with. Just seems so counter-productive to me--but I don't want to judge.
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I guess it depends on the type of books. The books we are doing are mostly technical books with many images. The last one had over 400 images. I would not use Sigil to compose a fiction book or any book that was mostly text, but with an image intensive technical book you really need to be looking at what the final product will look like. Most of our books are sold as eBooks, a much smaller amount are print. Major decisions on content are based on seeing the book in ePub form. This is especially true when optimizing the file size. With Amazon charging delivery fees based on the file size of ebooks, the file size is a major factor. In a perfect world this would not be the case, but hey. One of our books has 343 images (not little clips, I mean large images) and an Amazon paid deliverable size of 3.68 megabytes. This can't be done after the fact in the final editing stage, the book (and every single image) must be optimized during composition to achieve this. Ignore this and delivery fees will eat up most of the profits.
Another factor is the user experience of the ebook with reflowable text and lots of images. There are many things that seem fine in draft form (in LO or Word) and then look horrible when looking at the eBook on different readers. Simple editing and formatting will only solve some these issues. We routinely have to make major compositional changes and content changes before everything looks good or at least a decent compromise can be arrived at.
In our experience these types of books are better composed in Sigil. Image intensive books done in another tool or editor do not import or convert correctly and need so much tweaking that it is better to just do it from the beginning in Sigil.
Once we have our finished ePub, for conversion to PDF for Print we have several viable options, in each case we have to make some adjustments and substitute higher resolutions images. But doing it the other way around is a no-go. We have tried starting with the print versions first and converting to ePub in editors like InDesign, Scribus, Framemaker, Oxygen XML, etc. Not worth the trouble, these programs generate HUGE file sizes. We get a better results and workflow by starting with the ePub in Sigil and then working from there.