MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

Croker · 10-20-2009, 06:29 PM

Valloric

I'm loving Sigil and therefore have posted here to commend you on your hard work. Kudos!

Anyway, I do have one possible suggestion for you - is it possible to implement a "drop cap" setting into Sigil?

Allow me to explain - despite the explanations I've found here on the forums in how to add drop caps to ePubs, they might as well be written in Greek for all I understand of them. I mean no disrespect to the people involved in those conversations, but they tend to assume a deep knowledge of the various ins-and-outs of source code as used in an ePub file, and how to amend it manually.

For those of us who use programs like Book Designer and Sigil to tidy up our files and get them to display in the way we like, trying to tamper with the source code is too complex and daunting - at least, in my experience. I was nearly in tears of frustration trying to get fonts of my own choice to work with ePub files on my Sony Reader, and that was relatively straightforward to achieve (with the help of Calibre)!

So, my suggestion for Sigil is as follows - would it be possible to highlight a letter of text - at the very start of a chapter - and turn it into a drop cap by clicking a button in Sigil? I appreciate that I have no idea of how difficult this would be to achieve on a technical level, but it would be a massive bonus to me if you could pull it off.

I'd envisage that, in the same way you can highlight text in a file and click "bold" (and the source code will change to reflect your choice), you could do the same with a drop cap, selecting a letter and clicking the "drop cap" button (which would again insert the appropriate change to the source code).

So - is this possible (or even feasible!) or not? I'd be interested to know!

10-20-2009, 06:29 PM	#183
Croker Connoisseur Posts: 94 Karma: 630 Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Melbourne, Australia Device: Kobo Libra Colour, obv.	Valloric I'm loving Sigil and therefore have posted here to commend you on your hard work. Kudos! Anyway, I do have one possible suggestion for you - is it possible to implement a "drop cap" setting into Sigil? Allow me to explain - despite the explanations I've found here on the forums in how to add drop caps to ePubs, they might as well be written in Greek for all I understand of them. I mean no disrespect to the people involved in those conversations, but they tend to assume a deep knowledge of the various ins-and-outs of source code as used in an ePub file, and how to amend it manually. For those of us who use programs like Book Designer and Sigil to tidy up our files and get them to display in the way we like, trying to tamper with the source code is too complex and daunting - at least, in my experience. I was nearly in tears of frustration trying to get fonts of my own choice to work with ePub files on my Sony Reader, and that was relatively straightforward to achieve (with the help of Calibre)! So, my suggestion for Sigil is as follows - would it be possible to highlight a letter of text - at the very start of a chapter - and turn it into a drop cap by clicking a button in Sigil? I appreciate that I have no idea of how difficult this would be to achieve on a technical level, but it would be a massive bonus to me if you could pull it off. I'd envisage that, in the same way you can highlight text in a file and click "bold" (and the source code will change to reflect your choice), you could do the same with a drop cap, selecting a letter and clicking the "drop cap" button (which would again insert the appropriate change to the source code). So - is this possible (or even feasible!) or not? I'd be interested to know!