MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - What Features or Tools does Sigil Still Need Yet?

KevinH · 03-06-2021, 12:29 PM

Saving search parameters is already on my future to-do list (see an earlier post in this thread) and this is not a zero sum game since we are talking about over the next year or 2 or even 3.

Issue #220 can already be done with specially crafted regular expressions with look ahead and look behind to rule out unclosed html tags.

Alternatively we could strip out all tags but keep track of the starting position of each character (or word maybe) and then do search on that.

The problem is how to do replace when the found text to be replaced spans multiple nodes in the tree. This is actually a hard problem to solve. That is why find and replace in most browsers is limited to contiguous strings which of course breaks down when markup tags, spans, drop caps, etc are involved.

Until I can think of some way of solving that issue, we are limited to using complex regular expressions to rule out the contents of the tags themselves.

So all of these suggested new features should be viewed on their own merit.

Let us (the Sigil developers) worry about their priority. We will only accept new feature suggestions that we feel we can actually handle and that are doable without major rewrites of Sigil (I am done with major rewrites of Sigil, there are very very few files I have not had to edit over the last 5 years so I really do not want to have to repeat that anytime soon.)

Thanks for your input!

03-06-2021, 12:29 PM	#168
KevinH Sigil Developer Posts: 8,884 Karma: 6120478 Join Date: Nov 2009 Device: many	Saving search parameters is already on my future to-do list (see an earlier post in this thread) and this is not a zero sum game since we are talking about over the next year or 2 or even 3. Issue #220 can already be done with specially crafted regular expressions with look ahead and look behind to rule out unclosed html tags. Alternatively we could strip out all tags but keep track of the starting position of each character (or word maybe) and then do search on that. The problem is how to do replace when the found text to be replaced spans multiple nodes in the tree. This is actually a hard problem to solve. That is why find and replace in most browsers is limited to contiguous strings which of course breaks down when markup tags, spans, drop caps, etc are involved. Until I can think of some way of solving that issue, we are limited to using complex regular expressions to rule out the contents of the tags themselves. So all of these suggested new features should be viewed on their own merit. Let us (the Sigil developers) worry about their priority. We will only accept new feature suggestions that we feel we can actually handle and that are doable without major rewrites of Sigil (I am done with major rewrites of Sigil, there are very very few files I have not had to edit over the last 5 years so I really do not want to have to repeat that anytime soon.) Thanks for your input!