It appears that Sigil saves all work only as ePub data. Perhaps I'm very old school and I know I'm pretty dense but I find it extremely mystifying trying to use Sigil.
First, it crashed on me on about the 10th chapter! No problem, I've been saving manually for every one, I'll simply reopen all those 'chapter' files. Uhmn, where are they?! Nothing but '.epub' files on my drives. Why weren't the originals saved? They are simply text files, pure ASCII, probably.
Of course, the file(s) that were open when the crash occurred are none existent now, nothing left but an .epub that won't open. Lesson learned, I'm now saving copies via BBEdit!
OK, I start the process over completely. Fortunately, I used iBooks Publisher to create the first version so I already have an iBook, txt and PDF version to play with. I used the PDF to copy stuff into Sigil.
Now, I don't have time to finish this in one sitting. So I save it for the hundredth time and Quit Sigil. Now, even without a crash, there are still no files other than those needed for an ePub. Why not? OK, I'll try opening the ePub document just created in Sigil and see if that will get all my data, css, TOC, etc back for new editing.
Well, sorta. The list of 'chapter' files are displayed in the side panel and so is the TOC. But Sigil opened a new window with nothing but the standard template. Where is the menu that let's me view/edit any of the previous work?!
Perhaps it's some control/right-click command, the app seems to be ported from some COBOL mainframe...
Frankly, I don't see a reason to use Sigil over a read X?HTML editor like BBEdit or even TextWrangler. At least ones files would be safe in another format!
Do I sound frustrated/irritated or worse? That just may be because I am. I've never seen a less intuitive app for such a simple process. ePub building doesn't require C++!
I suppose there are tutorials somewhere but the only ones I've found just repeat the extreme basics. I've found absolutely nothing about actually using the app that would require more than a hours work.
I'd appreciate anyone having the time to answer my obviously super-simple questions.