Improvements? New Features? post sigil 2.7.6

[KevinH]

Since Sigil 2.7.6 is out there and seems to be quite stable,
I am again opening a thread to collect ideas for improvements and/or new features for Sigil.

The same caveats still exist:

- not something better done in a Sigil plugin

- only things that will help the majority of users

- no "super editor" features better handled with "Open With" and your favourite editor

So if you have a suggestion that meets these criteria then please add it to this thread and make an argument for its usefullness.

Not all suggestions will be accepted, if fact many will be rejected for technical or user interface reasons, but if we accept your suggestion, I will work on adding it to Sigil for an upcoming future release.

Also please feel free to comment on the merits or issues associated with any suggestion made here so that everybody is informed.

Thank you.

[theducks]

I am breaking my rule of 'making it match another tool'
One of the things I do is Jump over to Calibre Editor to rotate and or resize images. (no other image edits)

Is there others that do not jump between that think this might be useful in Sigil?

[KevinH]

You can do that with Open With. For example, I use Inkscape on SVG images and Gimp for all others. It works great to do whatever I want with Images. If you want to block resize you can also use a plugin for that.

ImageMagick is a also good tool to add to OpenWith as a set of command line shell or bat scripts to handle things like resize and rotate by 90 or -90. That works too.

It all depends on how you want to resize and or rotate. What is the calibre image editing user interface like? I have never used it.

Why not use a real image editor with Open With?

Or are you just talking about using a css style to tranform::rotate()?

Or are you talking about using the QTransform class that is part of QPainter? QTransform (Qt) makes it painless to rotate, and resize images.

Are there standard rotations or standard image sizes you repeatedly use?

[theducks]

Calibre image stuff is for quick and simple while Editing: Resize, Rotate, Crop

For serious manipulations, I agree 3rd party Image edits is the way.

[KevinH]

I will play around with calibre to see how their interface works, and if something similar would make sense in an Image Tab in Sigil. And hopefully if others are interested they will chime in here too.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by KevinH

I will play around with calibre to see how their interface works, and if something similar would make sense in an Image Tab in Sigil. And hopefully if others are interested they will chime in here too.

That is why I asked. There are lots of us that have OUR OWN way of doing stuff, that no one else does. I rotate maps and charts for best fit on the screen. I have no reason for HiRes of anything else. I may be the only one ( Now where did I put that sword? )

[retiredbiker]

I have occasionally used the Calibre image editing to resize...usually a gigantic cover that is already in the book when I get it. But this is rare and only because it is handy at times. Almost all my real image editing is "open with Gimp".

One image situation that is a bit of a pain is when a book has many (maybe hundreds) of large png images that just take up an atrocious amount of space for no good reason. These don't compress very well. Currently, I export them all to a work folder, convert them all to jpg with ImageMagick, re-import then, replace all the ".png" with ".jpg", and then compress them.

For this, the Calibre image compression tool is great.

I can't see all that lot becoming part of Sigil. Especially since while the images are exported to a work folder I may do other things to them. But that simple, quick image compression tool...that I would certainly use a lot. I have no idea how it works, but it's fast and handy.

[KevinH]

Yes, that sounds like a job for a plugin. Lossless algorithms are already used in most png and gif images to some extent. Typically jpeg can have a compression setting and if more needs to be squeezed out, then a lossy compression is done.

But this type of change (ie. batch) is better done in a plugin, I think.

Both the python PIL module and Pyside6/Qt have both lossless and lossy compression routines to make this quite painless. Both can easily be used in a plugin. Perhaps a png file size cutoff filter coupled with an automated jpeg conversion, and a user controllable jpeg lossy parameter inside a plugin to apply to all images would be of interest to others.

I will think about creating such a plugin if others think it would be helpful.

[BetterRed]

See ==>> Calibre: Mac keyboard shortcut to move file to end of list

I've only wanted to reorder the text files in an EPUB on rare occasions. When I have it's taken me several attempt's to get what I want using drag-n-drop in Sigil (didn't use calibre to do this because it will offer to merge files if you drop one file onto another)

Until today, I didn't know I could do it with some fixed shortcuts in calibre… see post #5 in above link. But it has limitation on Mac due to lack of an End Key.

You'll see I suggested a Move flyout menu, I suggest the same could be provided in Sigil.

Suggest rename the existing Move... to Move to..., and label the suggested flyout menu to Move within -> Up/Down/First (or Top)/Last (or Bottom) - whether they should have shortcuts I'll leave to you, but if they're provided I suggest they be configurable and default to None.

BR

[KevinH]

Not sure about adding a extra popup menu for something done rarely if at all for most epubs. I will look into a keyboard equivalent to see if that is doable as order is only relevant in BookBrowser for Text/XHtml files.

[theducks]

+1 on a bulk action (do this on all selected) I just tidied up a book that not only had 39 identical stylesheets, but 36 chapter number heads were large images 2400xnnnn. I shrunk each to 450W and adjusted the assigned stylesheet.
Not bad styling, just horrific coding (IMHO 3M unnecessary size)

[BetterRed]

@Kevin - don't implement a keyboard-shortcut-only feature just for me. I only set keyboard shortcuts for frequently used actions, and I remove rarely used default shortcuts.

I prefer rarely used actions to be accessible via a visual means which usually means a menu. Now I know the calibre editor has some fixed shortcuts, on the rare occasions I do need to move some files around I can use it - it's usually been more then one file.

BR

[Capricorn]

Originally Posted by theducks

I am breaking my rule of 'making it match another tool'
One of the things I do is Jump over to Calibre Editor to rotate and or resize images. (no other image edits)

Is there others that do not jump between that think this might be useful in Sigil?

Lol.....I do exactly the same, as it is so easy. No searching for my external app for images (paint.net), just quick and easy action with the calibre editor.

[philja]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

One image situation that is a bit of a pain is when a book has many (maybe hundreds) of large png images that just take up an atrocious amount of space for no good reason. These don't compress very well. Currently, I export them all to a work folder, convert them all to jpg with ImageMagick, re-import then, replace all the ".png" with ".jpg", and then compress them.
For this, the Calibre image compression tool is great.

I have a similar routine for converting a folder of png's to jpg's with ImageMagick's mogrify command. You can specify the jpeg compression with Magick's -quality option.

So all can be done in a single batch operation with no need to go to a second app.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

[...]For this, the Calibre image compression tool is great. [...] I can't see all that lot becoming part of Sigil.

Shameless plug: I created two plugins for image compression.
[Plugin] PNGOptimizer - Lossless/lossy image optimization
[Plugin] JPEGOptimizer - Lossless image optimization