[philja]

Sigil's error messages, displayed in a pink box at the top of the Preview pane, are difficult to read and misleading in several respects.

This causes difficulty in explaining to fellow authors who I'm trying to convert to Sigil. In making small edits using copy/paste, they quite frequently damage a tag.

1. If the Preview pane is not wide enough, the message runs off the side of the screen. The text does not wrap. See Ex-1.png

2. Depending on what's wrong in the code, the message refers to the wrong line/column combination. See Ex-2.png

In the example screenshots, there is a missing < at the closing </p> tag on line 14, column 433 (as witnessed at the bottom, RHS of the screen). See Ex-3.png

The error message reports "line 75, column 8" which in reality is the location in this file at the end of the </body> tag.

3. If the closing > is the one missing at the end of the same paragraph, (on line 14, column 436), the error message returns error at line 16, column 3.

I can see a certain logic in this case because after the use of the 'Mend and Prettify' tool, there is a blank line 15 and line 16 starts at column 3.

Encouraging the use of Prettify complicates the finding of a simple error.
Instead of reporting the last available place where the missing element could be, could Sigil report the first possible place?

There are several instances where the message is difficult to understand but the location is ok. Also, there are occasions when the message gets truncated like this:

"error on line 16 at column 44: Opening and ending tag mismatch: h2 line 16 and a".

And that is not a case of the Preview pane having insufficient width. Moreover, the error in this case was a missing < at column 27, inside an edited internet link.

Links are another item that our non-tech authors often mangle.