Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
There has been some discussion of late regarding the exorcising of Book View. I thought it might b worthwhile to have somewhere users can document any concerns.
BR
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First of all, some context: I am the author of 15 books, many of them available as e-books, and some of these I've built with Sigil. I'm also a software engineer, so working in code view is pretty natural to me. In spite of this I have always used Book View, or mostly Book View.
The case against Book View is that Sigil was never meant to be a WYSIWYG epub editor. But this misses the point entirely: Sigil is a wonderful WYSIWYG epub editor. The good people who have invested so much of their time in Sigil development (thank you, thank you) have gone to great lengths to make it so.
More important, lots of writers are not software engineers, and for them, code view is simply impossible. I would hate for Sigil to be be for coders only, since there are so many more non-coders out there.
This forum has slightly self-selected for people who are inclined to use code view. The reason for this is a tiny and easily corrected omission in the way Sigil works: There is no proper default CSS included in the package. A proper CSS would redefine <p> to look like a real book paragraph (indented, justified, serif font, no leading or trailing space, etc). If that seems a bit much to you, keep in mind that there is effectively a default CSS: i.e., the default parameters of html. It was meant for web sites and is thus entirely unsuitable for epubs. In order to make a decent epub, you have to create a CSS or borrow one from NotJohn or other providers, but either way, you have to get into the nitty gritty of CSS, and that tends to select out people who should be the natural constituency of Sigil.
I propose to weigh in a bit later with a few additional upgrades which would make Book View even better.
Please don't ditch Book View and leave the non-coders out of our Sigil World,
Tom DeMarco