Sigil’s Future Direction (Post 0.4.x)

[Danger]

Originally Posted by user_none

I'm on a Mac. If Sigil were to ever go non-cross platform it would be OS X only.

Originally Posted by user_none

...I'm not about to add support for Apple's non-standard, industry destroying, money grubbing practices.

I feel a bit of discrepancy with the above...

Originally Posted by user_none

<rant> One thing in particular I keep hearing is the ability to set a default font in book view. Sigil is not a reading app, if you want a particular font then specify it in the file. Also, the good thing about a standard default font is it is very easy to tell if the file has specified a font.
</rant>

Agreed... mostly. Bookview should have some limited font settings, basically; serif, sans-serif and the embedded font(s) specified IN the CSS. No other fonts should be used. The whole purpose of Sigil is as an ePub editor, NOT an ePub reader. There are several ePub readers out there. ePubReader for firefox, ADE just to name two I have.

If anybody cares...

Why do I use Sigil? To fix up my paid for retail epubs... spelling mistakes, decrease the default margins to get the most of my Kobo's screen, fix the meta-tag for book title for books in a series so that the books in a series are displayed together and in order (particulary my Star Wars collection), remove book pages that I don't need/want/use such as the TOC, dedication, copyright, other book previews etc. Fix the cover to reflect the actual hard copy cover, I hate those crappy green covers use by ballantine books. I mostly work in CV but use BV alot as well to view changes I've made. A spell check in BV would be helpful at times but not essential.

What I would like fixed, at least I think it's not working. When renaming pages, using 0.4.2, Sigil seems to work just fine, the toc.ncx and content.opf files are updated accordingly however when removing pages the content.opf file is not updated and I have to manually go in and remove the file references.

Anyway just my 2 bits.

[bobcdy]

My two requests now are for a Book View spellcheck and for a Perl regex. As a slow learner of regex, I generally am learning with perl because I think it's the most widespread flavor, but then using Sigil I find that a search with perl regex often does not work.

[Freeshadow]

i don't see need to double stuff

1. do text in LibreOffice
2. spellcheck
3. run lukes makro over it
4. load resulting epub into sigil
5. tweak the rest

because John &others has more time to build new epub tweak stuff in.

[Toxaris]

Well, the plugin would be handy. I would love a plugin in which I can store several RegEx S&R. Especially when I want to correct old ePUB's that I made.

[daubnet]

I like Sigil, and appreciate that you're openly discussing the future direction of it's development.

I see two ways of approaching this subject:

1. define a target audience. This is "who will use the app"
2. define "use cases". That's "what is the user's task"

I see Sigil as a tool, or set of tools. Choosing a tool mostly depends on the task at hand, which is why I'd focus on the latter more.

Let's use the "spell checking" feature as an example. Somebody whose workflow starts with a word processor and then exports the stuff to ePUB does not need a spell checker, regardless of the person being a "power user" or not. Somebody whose workflow does not include a word processor (like editing existing ePUBs) might have a need for a spell checker. Again, that is independent of the person's experience level.

I think the overall tasks people use Sigil for are these three:

• changing an ebook to be the "way I want on my reader"
• preparing an ebook to be released in stores
• editing an ebook to serve as intermediate format in a chain (e.g. to use with KindleGen)

None of the above is something that Joe Average does today, but none of those tasks are so difficult that Joe Average couldn't possibly do it, given good tools. And please, if you come up with a fourth use case, go ahead and add it to the list. The way I see it, understanding what people want to do is an important step to making it a good piece of software.

Above general use cases can be split into a number of smaller tasks that may or may not be needed. Such a list of smaller tasks could look like this:

• reading the book
• Proofreading
• edit content
• edit metadata
• Importing data (entire book, a chapter, or just fragments like images)
• Exporting data (entire book, parts of the book)
• edit markup (XHTML)
• edit layout (CSS)
• edit TOC (NCX)
• compatibility checking
• compatibility tweaks (may include any part of code, see 'Nook Color Cover' issue)
• making sure an ePUB validates

This list is far from complete, and should be extended to more specific use cases like "assigning an ISBN to the book" or "making sure the eReader's font isn't overridden by CSS".

You may be thinking "reading the book" and "proofreading" should be the same item - no they're not. While proofreading does include the task of actually reading the book, it may also include spell checking, taking notes, and checking document structure. The point is: is Sigil meant to be used for proofreading purposes? If so, it needs a spell checker. If it isn't, then such a function is a waste of time.

I have my personal oppinions about certain features as well, but I think it is way more important to define what use cases Sigil is designed to handle.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I'm a software author myself (totally unrelated to ebooks) and am personally using Sigil to prepare ePUBs for public release.

[crutledge]

FYI. No big thing.

About half the time a section will open in SPLIT VIEW.

Any time a change is made to content.opf or the cursor is clicked outside the window, the opf reverts to the top of the file. Standard editing is difficult.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by crutledge

About half the time a section will open in SPLIT VIEW.

Any time a change is made to content.opf or the cursor is clicked outside the window, the opf reverts to the top of the file. Standard editing is difficult.

I noticed pages opening in split view too. I didn't try to analyze when/why, I thought I was just clicking on the wrong thing.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I noticed pages opening in split view too. I didn't try to analyze when/why, I thought I was just clicking on the wrong thing.

my initial observation is it happens only with short chapters i.e. if book view takes up less than 1 screen then I also see start of code view.

but I've not investigated in any detail

[mrmikel]

I'd like Sigil to delete images from the images folder as they are removed from the document.

I was trying to shrink a 20 meg epub down and every time I replaced a large image with a smaller one the file grew...to 27 meg ultimately. After removing the extras by hand, 4 meg!

[st_albert]

I've had this problem as well, and I've always been able to resolve it by selecting the now-unused file (in sigil) and right-click | remove. Does this not work for you? And if it does, what more could Sigil do? I'm asking, not telling. Not sure what your expectations are.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I'd like Sigil to delete images from the images folder as they are removed from the document.

As st_albert stated you can delete the images from within Sigil by right clicking and selecting remove. Any automated process to remove images that are not referenced in the document is problematic as a person may be in the middle of editing the document. Manual removal of images via Sigil seems to be the best practical implementation of image removal.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I'd like Sigil to delete images from the images folder as they are removed from the document.

I was trying to shrink a 20 meg epub down and every time I replaced a large image with a smaller one the file grew...to 27 meg ultimately. After removing the extras by hand, 4 meg!

Sorry: real bad idea
I reuse many images in multiple places (chapter headings, scene breakers, title page decorations.

OMG delete 1 and you broke the whole book in many cases
I just finished tweaking a book
72 chapters with the same image (background) for the chapter number (overlay)
The image exists once (8.02KB) and replaces 72 images (424.8KB)
Serious file size reduction

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

As st_albert stated you can delete the images from within Sigil by right clicking and selecting remove. Any automated process to remove images that are not referenced in the document is problematic as a person may be in the middle of editing the document. Manual removal of images via Sigil seems to be the best practical implementation of image removal.

Hell, for that matter, you can click it in the folder and hit "delete" (at least, in Win7), and it will simply confirm it and kablammo, it's gone. I don't know what else Sigil could do; I certainly don't want it deleting anything from the dirs if I get crazy and inadvertently delete a line of code with an image tag, or if our unofficial mascot whaps the keyboard with his paws and does damage, which has been known to happen (he once typed a line of ++++++ to someone in Skype and frequently puts his head on the numberpad, particularly the <enter> key). With my kind of office help, I don't need Sigil "helping" me any further, thanks. ;-)

Hitch

[kiwidude]

What would perhaps help in this regard would be two things:

(1) Multi-select in the tree to allow deleting multiple items at once (and merging multiple at once). While you are at it, fixing the post-delete/merge glitch so instead of jumping all the way back to the root it just selects the previous item. Freaking annoying to have to keep scrolling down all the time. I have raised a bug request for this IIRC.

(2) Enhancing the FlightCheck report so that it has context aware fixes for some of the things it finds. So if it reports an image being unused, a right-click action should give you the option to remove the unused files for those selected items.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

(1) Multi-select in the tree to allow deleting multiple items at once

Big +1 for this idea.