Thanks Turtle91, your question is getting to the crux of the matter. I think that most of the people responding to this thread have the useage case in mind where Sigil is being used as the final editor. The usage case of using Sigil as a content creation tool and an editor at the same time comes as a surprise. As I was talking about in the last post we use Sigil for content creation and editing simultaneously. Regardless of whether Sigil was originally designed with this use case in mind or not, it works well for us. There is no better tool or workflow that we have been able to find.
Quote:
It seems like you have two concerns: 1) Adding content, and 2) Seeing how
the book looks.
1) You can just as easily type in the code view window.
|
Since we are doing lots of writing and rewriting in Sigil for the reasons I was talking about in the last post, it is desired to have a distraction free writing mode. If we were doing only editing it would not be so important, but we are doing a considerable amount of writing and content creation in Sigil. Many people are surprised by this and have the opinion that Sigil was not designed as a word processor, but just because we do a substantial amount of writing in Sigil does not mean that we think it is a word processor. Your work flow of writing in one stage (in a word processor) followed by importing to Sigil and editing the HTML in Sigil is not the same as our work flow. In our workflow we are doing much of the writing and of course the HTML editing in Sigil. It is a different workflow. It works for us.
Code View is horrible for distraction free writing. Not for any technical reason, but simply because looking at HTML is distracting when we are trying to concentrate on writing. Preview mode helps, but in preview mode the Code View panel is still what you end up looking at while typing. Code View with Preview is not a distraction free writing interface, HTML code is still in your face (and inevitably you start thinking about it and tweaking it instead of thinking about and visualizing the content). We would rather write in Book View for 30 distraction free minutes at a time and then occasionally switch to Code View and do any necessary HTML and CSS tweaks.
We also frequently cut formatted and unformatted text from other windows and paste it into the Book View window in Sigil, so we want to use Sigil (in Book View) in one window, side by side with LO, Word or Chrome in another window. This two window setup is clean and allows us to concentrate on writing, cutting & pasting a large amount of content quickly. If we start screwing around with HTML editing at the same time as writing our concentration goes out the window and productivity is majorly impacted. We have tested this extensively. Contrary to what many people think, human brains do not multitask very well. There is a large body of recent research to back this up. Writing content while HTML editing is not productive, they should be done one at a time.
Also in Code View with Preview we can not cut and paste formatted text the same way, because pasting formatted text is a feature of Book View. Another thing is that using Code View with Preview gives you three main panels or windows, Code View, Preview and then LO, Word or Chrome. We don't want three windows. On our laptops without dual displays we want two windows side by side not three.
In our use case alternating between Book View and Code View really is what we want to do. Book View is a major reason why Sigil is much better than the Calibre editor for us.