[KevinH]

I started thinking more about this but I strongly dislike using a table with columns that are empty or represent more than one thing or or that simply do not make sense for a particular value.

If you split out main title and its file-as, and author (and its file as), language (primary and secondary), and use a big box for description ... you really need two different tables to handle most of the rest:

The first for other creators and contributors with 4 columns:

Marc-Function, Name, File-As, Creator vs Contributor

And the second scrolling table for all other name value pairs with columns:

Name, Value

This can hold all identifiers, all dates, all subjects, rights, formats, additional descriptions, sources, cover, and etc.

Shoehorning things into a single flat table like we did with epub2 just makes no sense to me.

That is why I like our existing MetaEditor. As differing columns just become added properties under the main entry. So the whole thing becomes a list which can be reordered easily and at will and effectively allows a variable number of columns to be available for any specific metadata entry.

So maybe a MetaData starter page with just this:

Title, File-As
Author1, File-As
Author2, File-As
Author3, File-As
Language1, Language2
Big Description Box

With a button to take you to the current MetaData Editor for all else.

Thoughts?

Alternatively we could stay with the current MetaEditor and try to replace all code pieces with translated names but keep the list with added extras approach, but try to do more to hide the code itself.

The actual menus to add Elements in the current, is really not far off the Add Basics we used before.

I just hated the table approach we used before as we just shoehorned various metadata length pieces into those misnamed columns.

Ideas? Thoughts?

Originally Posted by Doitsu

While Sigil has a fully functioning metadata editor, I liked the table-based design of earlier versions better.

Here's a mockup of a table-based metadata editor (based on my epub2 metadata plugin) that I'd like to see in a future version:



(The Title File-As box should be hidden for epub2 books.)

I know that it'll be difficult to create a solution that works for epub3 and epub2 books, but especially new Sigil users will probably prefer a table-based GUI over a tree-based GUI.