[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Currently this is the way Sigil works. Adding the ability to separately view and edit each XHTML file would require massive re-engineering of the importers, exporters and the entire GUI which is currently geared towards single-flow editing. I'm not ready to do that yet. Not any time soon. Maybe in Sigil 2.0.

I realize it's a design decision. But couldn't it just be a "view" option? Just display the block between two red lines (and have a button or something to display next/previous blocks). That wouldn't need a change in the way the book is stored internally, I guess, and would make long books more manageable, especially the scrollbars.

Since separate CSS files are loaded as separate style tags, and separate style tags get exported as separate CSS files, I don't see why you can't decide which styles go into which file right now.

I see, and Zelda's example helped I had misunderstood at first.

Would be lovely, wouldn't it? Especially embedding epub-check. But they are all written in Java. Sigil is in C++. I have no intention of requiring the Java runtime for Sigil. And no, GCJ is not an option.

Maybe just include the possibility of using the validators as external programs or web services: you click on "validate" and it sends the file to the web, or runs the appropriate command line.

I was thinking of users being able to add their own date elements. That is, I go to an options screen, click on something like "Add new date event", and then type in "Reprint" or whatever. A list of these custom date elements would be in a list near that button. I would then go to the Meta Editor and the new date type would be selectable in the "Add Basic" dialog. Of course, in the background this would merely change the event attribute on the date element created.

You have to think of options in the form of "How am I going to present this to the user in a simple and usable way?". This is absolutely crucial, which unfortunately many OSS developers don't understand.

Of course, I agree. What would you think of the user selecting just "date" in the "Add Basic" (or advanced) dialog and then getting a new dialog for selecting which kind of date (event)? Some events would be predefined, but it would be possible to add custom ones on the fly. Just an idea for the future

You sound like you want to edit all of the XHTML, CSS, XPGT files etc. as separate files in an editor that would in the end just wrap everything up into an epub. That's great. But that's not what Sigil is. Not right now anyway. If something like this is added, it would be accessible by explicitly switching to the "advanced" GUI. I have no immediate plans for making this happen, although I would like to add it somewhere down the line. But not any time soon. There are more important issues to attend to, and they impact the other 95%, if not everyone.

Yes, as I said I was trying to see how I could fit Sigil in my workflow, and I'm the kind of user who likes to control evrery single comma I'm aware that my needs are probably not the same as those of 95% of the users. Please forgive my nitpicking

This is also a GUI issue first, and an implementation issue second. The QDate object used to store dates demands months and days specified. Using this native Qt object provides us with an effortless way to edit them in a GUI: just shove the QDate into a TableView (like in Meta Editor) and the user is limited to entering only valid days, years and months. Each field in the date can be edited separately, and the object restrains the user to only valid values. Adding support for inserting only some parts of a date would mean ditching the native QDate objects and forcing users to type everything in as a text string.

It's not the first time I encounter this shortcoming (in my view) of "date" data types. If I remember correctly MySQL allows entering 00 for day or month when it is not known or important, but the GUIs I tried did not recognize it... As a workaround (if wanted) I can think of adding some auxiliary variable that would tell the program to use only the year or the year and month (in the GUI, it could be a checkbox or dropdown to select "full date", "only year and month" or "only year".