Hello. Where do I make suggestions for future improvements?

[spelunker]

Hello, where do I go to officially contact the developers of sigil to make suggestions for future improvements. Thanks.

[Turtle91]

You're here!!

Welcome to MR!

[KevinH]

But check out this thread first before posting ...

It shows the completed to-do items and those suggestions already being considered.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=342527

Only suggestions that help multiple users will be considered. Also things better done via Sigil plugins should be directed to our plugin dev thread.

Specifically this post and the one after:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=68


https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=69

[spelunker]

Originally Posted by KevinH

But check out this thread first before posting ...

It shows the completed to-do items and those suggestions already being considered.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=342527

Only suggestions that help multiple users will be considered. Also things better done via Sigil plugins should be directed to our plugin dev thread.

Specifically this post and the one after:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=68


https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=69

Ok. I see something similar but not quite.

In a real book, pages like dedication and copyright and others may not have big honking h1 titles. But your app uses h1s to make the toc and maybe toc.ncx (I don't know how you do that). So we have to add them into our epub whether we want them or not.

All you have to do is change the thing that creates the toc from <h> tags in the actual text of the book to the <title> in the head section of the page. The reader never has to see that except for when it shows up in the toc and toc.ncx.

OK?

And thanks for developing sigil.

[DiapDealer]

Sigil allows you to create your toc any way you see fit. It doesn't force the use of H1 anywhere I can think of. I'm afraid I'm not quite following what you're asking for.

[Turtle91]

I use display:none when I don't want to see the header on a page.

<h2 style="display:none" title="Copyright"></h2>

I have heard however, that Kindle doesn't like that. I'm not sure if they just ignore it or what?? I suppose you could use line-height:0 instead, but I hate using work arounds for other's bad coding...

Otherwise the headers you use do NOT all have to be <h1>. They are supposed to be hierarchical...how you use that is up to you, but I use it like:

h1 - Title
h2 - Front matter (dedication, foreword, etc.)
h3 - Chapter Titles
h2 - Back matter (also by, author's note, copyright)

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I use display:none when I don't want to see the header on a page.

<h2 style="display:none" title="Copyright"></h2>

I have heard however, that Kindle doesn't like that. I'm not sure if they just ignore it or what??

Amazon does not accept a TOC entry pointing to content styled as display:none.
For example if the NCX has:

<content src="Text/Chapter01.xhtml#chap01"/>

with HTML content:

<h3 id="chap01" style="display: none">Chapter 1</h3>

it will be rejected with the error:

E24010: Hyperlink not resolved in toc (One possible reason can be that the link points to a tag with style display:none)

[phillipgessert]

Dedications and copyright pages don’t necessarily have to appear in a TOC at all. I usually don’t include them there. When I do, it is like Turtle91’s above, but without the display:none so it still gets nudged down a bit.

[DiapDealer]

I know people love to auto-generate HTML tocs via a hierarchical h tag strategy, but I've never found it all that difficult to manually insert a few entries (directly to xhtml pages or anchor tags) after everything has been finalized. The ability to automatically generate a new toc at any point in time has never been one I valued very much. Once a book is finished, why would I ever need to be able to repeatedly regenerate the toc?

But regardless... I think Sigil already offers enough flexibility to edit/generate tocs that I just don't see a need to bring the contents of the title tags into it. I'm not shutting the door on it, but I'd need to be convinced there's a lot of people who would value such a thing.

[phillipgessert]

Offered FWIW, but personally I think a TOC target that doesn’t match the TOC entry (because it’s pointing to something unlabeled) should be used very sparingly. I definitely do it sometimes, but it seems like it should be rare. Also seems like using title tags correctly is probably kinda rare. Change like that’d have a lot of folks that aren’t real dialed in asking why TOC generation doesn’t work.

[elibrarian]

Originally Posted by spelunker

In a real book, pages like dedication and copyright and others may not have big honking h1 titles. But your app uses h1s to make the toc and maybe toc.ncx (I don't know how you do that). So we have to add them into our epub whether we want them or not.

All you have to do is change the thing that creates the toc from <h> tags in the actual text of the book to the <title> in the head section of the page. The reader never has to see that except for when it shows up in the toc and toc.ncx.

You can style the <h1>'s like almost any other tag via css. So if you want some of your headers to be smaller, you just make <h1 class="smaller_h1"> (or something), and a corresponding style in your stylesheet. And Sigil willl of course still take those headers in consideration as <h1> when making the toc.

Regards,

Kim

[KevinH]

Yes, this is how I would do it. Or as DiapDealer suggested, just edit the final Nav or NCX to point to the top of those files.

That said, adding heading tags is important for Accessibility / desktop reading systems for the visually impaired. So using a structural/heading tag is important. That is why we have been loathe to make it easy to skip the structural tags like h1-h6 when creating a toc.

Making a heading from a "p" tag just so you do not use a h1-h6 tag is just wrong when you can use css to make any heading tag look exactly the way you want, or hide them completely, while still properly marking the structure of the document for screen readers.

Originally Posted by elibrarian

You can style the <h1>'s like almost any other tag via css. So if you want some of your headers to be smaller, you just make <h1 class="smaller_h1"> (or something), and a corresponding style in your stylesheet. And Sigil willl of course still take those headers in consideration as <h1> when making the toc.

Regards,

Kim

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon does not accept a TOC entry pointing to content styled as display:none.
For example if the NCX has:<content src="Text/Chapter01.xhtml#chap01"/>

with HTML content:<h3 id="chap01" style="display: none">Chapter 1</h3>

it will be rejected with the error:E24010: Hyperlink not resolved in toc (One possible reason can be that the link points to a tag with style display:none)

Cool - I only use that display:none with headings that appear at the top of the page. Sigil's auto TOC algorythm, IIRC, just links those to the top of the page rather than directly to the <h>.

[spelunker]

Pointing out the obvious:

ALL of this could be avoided by generating your toc through the head element <title> as I suggested.

Real books have some pages without big honking titles. I would like to emulate real books. Why do you want to force me to do anything different? Now you're all talking about how to get around the requirement, oh, but kindle doesn't like it so you can't do it with kindle books. What if you change the requirement that shouldn't be there in the first place?

Are you interested in making the app better? This would make the app better.

[Turtle91]

Hi again spelunker!

The part you are missing, which we didn't really address very well, is that when you are putting together your document all of those tags are a specifically meant to define the "structure" of the document; the semantics. This is a header, this is a table, this is a division, this is a paragraph, etc. There is absolutely no discussion (well almost none...) about how it looks. With CSS you can make any of these tags look like any of the other tags... you can even make an <h5> bigger and redder and bolder and italicized, while an <h1> is miniscule/black/monoprint...that is all done with the CSS. The way something looks doesn't have anything to do with the semantic tags. Your comment about "big honking h1 titles" is simply incorrect...you just haven't used appropriate CSS styling to make them look good/better.

So using the <title> to create a ToC is using the semantic title incorrectly. A ToC describes (and provides links to) the structure of the document: chapters, sub-chapters, sections, sub-sections, etc. If you use the <title> to create the ToC, you would lose all those sections.

There is some info about the ToC generator in the Users Manual tha might help clarify it's use.

Cheers!