Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
If the external editor in question had it's own WYSIWYG editing/rendering capabilities, I would think you would be able to use those, but I wouldn't swear to it. You might potentially have to change some settings to make sure it's generating xhtml that Sigil will be able to deal with when it gets it back. But a more fully-featured xhtml editor that would let you edit the markup (and maybe even preview how things would render) should be doable. That's part of the reason the "Open With" feature (of which the preferred external html editor preference setting is a descendant) was created in the first place.
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At the risk of being tedious, but mostly in the way of explanation, ...
That's sort of what I was shooting for, though it's a risk/benefit trade-off in a couple of ways, and gaining the utility I want on the WYSIWYG side might not be worth the hassle of of "getting it back" into Sigil with accompanying risk.
Honestly, at the moment there are just two things that are bugging me from the user/writer perspective, and that Book View seemed to support (though Book View had it's own oddities and I fully understand the desire to flush it from a development/support perspective):
1. I (and I think most "writers") find it "unpleasant" to actually compose content by typing into a window of unformatted text that's heavily cluttered with tags. It's a bit like my trying to practice my trombone parts while my wife's hammering out Bach on the piano -- really distracting and an impediment to productivity. Believe me: I'm not unaccustomed to composing and editing documents in several varieties of tag languages, and for a number of years I was a very heavy-duty user of TeX. But in terms of just the actual writing/composing/content side of things, these are not the most productive approach. So (for me and, I think, other writers) even a fairly minimal set of WYSIWYG features is seen as a huge boost in pain-free productivity. Any kind of "preview" mode just doesn't make up for that (and we've known that since the SGML days). Which leads to ...
2. I'm now somewhat more than 350 pages into a book that's been written entirely with Sigil, and now cruising downhill towards the finish. For reasons I won't go into here, I have the need fairly frequently in this book to add links in the text either to other parts of the book or (much more often) to external sources on the Web. Unfortunately, although PageEdit appears to display links, I can't create or edit them in PageEdit -- and what it displays aren't even actually links, but just the highlighted text where there is a link in the XHTML code, although of course the Preview does display the functional link. But the main productivity hit for me is that when I need to add a link, I can't just do this from PageEdit in the (now "normal" in most editors) way of highlighting the text and clicking to get a link insertion dialog, and boom I'm done. Instead, I have to go into the source window, find the phrase I want to add the link to (which often is not that straightforward, given the lack of formatting, tag clutter, and lack of direct alignment with the PageEdit window), and then add the link.
So that's the dilemma that I'm trying to work around somehow. I'm not going to abandon Sigil, and so of the two horns of the dilemma, I'll probably attempt to adapt to composing in unformatted text in the source window and adding my links there as I'm composing. Or maybe I'll compose in formatted chunks in something like (yuck) Word and then just drop the resulting text into the Sigil source window and add formatting and links. And I may try the approach of using an external WYSIWYG XHTML editor or two and see how that goes since that may turn out to provide a bit more facility then the Word/plop approach. Or I suppose that I could just reinstall an earlier Sigil version and then update when the book is finished -- or maybe use the old and the new in parallel in order to check things on a periodic basis (assuming backward compatibility and all that). That might not be an outrageous idea for my own situation.
In any event, I appreciate the feedback you've provided and your suggestions, and they've provided me with some food for thought.