[Marg1780]

Hi, thank you both for responding. (Sorry for the slow response, I've been essentially offline for a couple of days.) Since I wasn't seeing tons of discussions of my issues, I figured it was localized to me, but hadn't been having any luck at all finding information on the possible cause. The information on the ini file changes (which are not at all obvious in Notepad) sounds like the needed solution for the clips issue, which is the worst one for me.

I have been working with the _v6 version since I bought a Win11 laptop. Initially, I wasn't seeing much change in the situation, except that the problem with the clips bar turning itself off spontaneously was new. My custom clips were behaving pretty much as they always have. (I've been using Sigil at least as far back as v0.4.1, though I don't remember when I started using clips.) Now and then, they'd vanish; I'd replace them and go on.

I do recognize that changing a clip when I had ten files open was guaranteed trouble. My clips change very infrequently, and I typically make the change outside of my normal work flow. If I forgot and added a new one unwisely then saw it vanish, I'd have a good idea of the reason.

Can you give me a hint where to find information on the export/import for clips? I don't recognize it in any of the menus, or the Preferences dialog, which makes sense functionally but I'm not sure where else to look. Have you added a configuration utility? I don't get any likely hits when I search the User Guide (2025 09 12, which was the latest when I last looked).

I recognize that the metadata rules for ePub3 are very different, though I've never gotten into them deeply since - until recently - the items I need have always been available via the metadata editor. And they still are, except that while I can still build a custom tag in an ePub3, it is later pruned without warning. The only tag that has no (known to me) replacement is the one which populates the rating field when the ePub is imported into Calibre. It seems odd that custom fields aren't allowed in ePub3 with an assumption that they'll just be ignored unless the book is imported into an app/device that understands them. I think that was the assumption in the early days of the standard.

Yes, a clean install sounds like a necessity, and apparently the amount of internals I need to know has grown greatly. I've always thought of Sigil as a closed-box app, but that approach seems to have become obsolete... Off to find the Preferences folder...