Robustness

[mrmikel]

As unreasonable as JimLL is, he is pointing out something that needs fixing. Trying to save a file that is html should give you a message: Sigil does not save HTML. Would you like your document saved as an EPUB?
And if the answer is yes, save it as an EPUB
It has been a long time since I went through this, but I remember how puzzling it was.

As for complaining about something that is free, aimed at pros and semi-pros and that no one is forcing you to use, that is an entirely different issue.

[Keroberos]

Seems like it would be rather difficult to create an autosave feature without removing the requirement that the epub be well formed before saving, it would be annoying to have Sigil constantly throw up error messages about being malformed. The only way around that would be to use some form of temporary file that changes are written to incrementally and can be used to restore after a crash (not that it crashes very often in my experience). I don't need an autosave feature since I already have one (hitting "ctrl+s" every so often, especially before a major find/replace or splitting a large xhtml file).

So you can concentrate on your work. I was writing auto saves 20 years ago.

Saving my work is part of my work, I would no more trust an autosave routine than I do any other automated process (not at all).

Of course it is possible to do an HTML save if you have time to highlight endless pages of it and save it to a file. Autosave IS needed.

Actually it's pretty easy. Save as epub, In the Book Browser pane select all the xhtml files in the text folder, right-click, select merge, switch to code view, copy and paste the xhtml into a text editor, save as xhtml, close Sigil discarding the changes.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Keroberos

Seems like it would be rather difficult to create an autosave feature without removing the requirement that the epub be well formed before saving, it would be annoying to have Sigil constantly throw up error messages about being malformed. The only way around that would be to use some form of temporary file that changes are written to incrementally and can be used to restore after a crash (not that it crashes very often in my experience). I don't need an autosave feature since I already have one (hitting "ctrl+s" every so often, especially before a major find/replace or splitting a large xhtml file).

Saving my work is part of my work, I would no more trust an autosave routine than I do any other automated process (not at all).

@Keroberos:

Thanks, that's what I was trying to say, not nearly as clearly as you did. ;-)

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As unreasonable as JimLL is, he is pointing out something that needs fixing. Trying to save a file that is html should give you a message: Sigil does not save HTML. Would you like your document saved as an EPUB?
And if the answer is yes, save it as an EPUB
It has been a long time since I went through this, but I remember how puzzling it was.

Actually, @mrmikel: assuming arguendo that somebody was writing autosave routines 20 years ago, why wouldn't s/he do what I did--and simply click "save as" and see what the available options (for type) were/are? When I was befuddled by this originally, I simply looked at "save as" and noodled out that the ONLY option was ePUB. Now, I'm no programmer (just ask my Crews--they'll be happy to tell you horror stories about my javascript!), but it was pretty obvious to me that Sigil had a single option. I can easily see that utter noobs, coming from, let's say, Word or Jutoh or what-have-you, might get boggled, but any pro or semi-pro or geekster should be able to see that it's just not intended to be an html editor. That's all I'm sayin'. Would it kill user_none to add that as a prompt? Probably not, but I don't think I remember seeing another post in the last few years quite this vexed over no "save as html," although I probably wouldn't have filed it away even if I had. Doesn't everyone save their work every 10-20 minutes? Hell, I do, particularly in Sigil--when I started out, I used to incur the PSOD (Pink Screen O'Death) so often I thought I was walking for Breast Cancer on a daily basis.

Hitch

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Keroberos

Seems like it would be rather difficult to create an autosave feature without removing the requirement that the epub be well formed before saving, it would be annoying to have Sigil constantly throw up error messages about being malformed. .

that is a very good point.

Another is that I may be carrying out a multi-stage repair/find & replace regex process & I would NOT want anything saved while am in the middle of that.
IF it goes wrong I want to revert to how the file was before I started that process; not to where an autosave had maybe kicked in part way though, maybe after I'd messed up already but had not yet realised it.

so please let's NOT add autosave, unless there is a user option to turn it OFF.

PS I have been using sigil pretty much daily for over a year. I'd don';t think it's ever crashed on me! I have add it fail to open a malformed epub but I have never lost work due to a program crash.

(but I have often mest up regex & had to discard changes + reload! )

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JimLL

Epub is not the base of ebooks - HTML is.

go tell that to the guys who make epub reader hardware.

I doubt there is even ONE reader device on the market that can handle raw HTML.

[DiapDealer]

IF it goes wrong I want to revert to how the file was before I started that process; not to where an autosave had maybe kicked in part way though, maybe after I'd messed up already but had not yet realised it.

That's exactly what I would fear the most (if an autosave feature were the default behavior). I often take a lot of chances knowing that I can always close without saving if I later discovered that a Find & Replace didn't go quite the way I anticipated. I value the ability to abandon unsaved changes higher than I would value autosaves every X minutes. Saving at the "wrong" time can be just as disastrous as losing work when a program crashes.

[meme]

There is an issue entered on the Sigil website requesting an optional autosave feature so it has not been forgotten. It will require changes to the underlying code and it could have a performance impact, and as mentioned there are issues around saving corrupted files and mid-changes. So its not a simple thing to implement, but it will remain on the list to look at at some point.

In the meantime, you should definitely be saving your file every so often - certainly more frequently than every several hours - and particularly before major find/replace changes. This is true for Sigil, and pretty much any other software that is used. That doesn't help with the frustration of losing data from a crash that shouldn't happen in the first place, but might help when it happens again.

There is some confusion over what you are expecting to be saved. Once you have imported your HTML file into Sigil, you are working with an EPUB file that happens to contain html/xhtml/css/images/etc files. When you Save or Save As, you are saving the whole EPUB including all the documents inside the EPUB whether they are html or css, etc. There is no option to save/export individual files (at least at the moment as far as I know).

If you try to run Save or Save As and Sigil says there is a problem saving - then this is IMPORTANT. As was said above, Sigil is telling you something is wrong with a document in your EPUB (or where you want to save the file) and you need to correct this. This is why its important to manually save often - it is very easy to corrupt an EPUB file and Sigil won't save a corrupted file so the sooner you find out about the problem the better. The warning usually gives a you a reason for the issue, and you can run validation checks on the document to help.

You can always post any questions about using Sigil to this forum, and if you have specific bug or feature requests post them to the issue log after checking for existing issues.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by meme

If you try to run Save or Save As and Sigil says there is a problem saving - then this is IMPORTANT. As was said above, Sigil is telling you something is wrong with a document in your EPUB (or where you want to save the file) and you need to correct this.

Along these lines, I have noticed some slightly confusing behavior by Sigil that might be related to the OP's grief:

If I open Sigil (just from the program icon, not by clicking on an existing epub) and then do a File->Open and choose an existing xhtml file and start doing some editing... when I later click File->Save, I immediately get the warning that; "Sigil currently cannot save files of type 'xhtml'. Please choose a different format." I then smack myself in the head and do a "File->Save as". I do this a lot.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems a little awkward. I know Sigil only saves epubs and that's exactly what I wanted it to do, so why did it assume I wanted to save the single xhtml file I was editing (especially since Sigil isn't designed to do that anyway)? Shouldn't the default behavior be to silently switch to the "Save As" dialog if the current document/book/epub hasn't been saved yet?

Most apps are capable of knowing the initial project "Save" needs to be a "Save As"... regardless of which of the two options the user clicked.

Does that make any sense?

[meme]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

If I open Sigil (just from the program icon, not by clicking on an existing epub) and then do a File->Open and choose an existing xhtml file and start doing some editing... when I later click File->Save, I immediately get the warning that; "Sigil currently cannot save files of type 'xhtml'. Please choose a different format."

That looks like an issue (I created one for it), and maybe why it confused the OP. I didn't even know Sigil could open html files directly until recently

We're actually considering removing the ability to open html files directly so that would fix this [ Edit: refers only to File Open and not to Add Existing Files ]

But given that someone actually uses this feature, we might have to think twice about keeping it (and fixing one or two bugs in the current process).

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by meme

We're actually considering removing the ability to open html files directly so that would fix this

But given that someone actually uses this feature, we might have to think twice about keeping it (and fixing one or two bugs in the current process).

Don't keep it just on my account.

I only do it because "File Open" is just so danged ingrained. If the option to do this for (x)html files went away, I'd be able to adapt to using the Add Existing File(s) method instead. If it makes more sense (logistically) to have File Open only "see" ePub files—especially if it helps eliminate this confusion—then I say do that.

[Perkin]

Instead of doing an autosave function, which can cause all sorts of problems, why not just have an optional timer, that the user can set 5/10/15/... mins, then when elapsed it pops up a msg box advising user that they haven't saved recently. the counter is reset when user saves.

[latepaul]

I'm only a casual and occasional user of Sigil so this is largely idle curiosity but this business of only saving valid ePubs raises a couple of questions for me. How easy is it to get into a situation where your current document isn't valid (i.e. won't save) and there's a non-trivial amount of work to either fix or undo it? In such a case I would want a way to save my current work-in-progress, perhaps in a custom format to make it clear it's not a valid ePub.

Then again it's possible this doesn't really arise, or only arises with an unusual work-flow?

[Perkin]

Can happen quite easily, especially if you're importing html that isn't as valid as it could/should be, which then needs cleaning up.

[Keroberos]

How easy is it to get into a situation where your current document isn't valid

Very easy, happens all the time, in my workflow with scanned books everything is imported with just <p> tags, I've marked everything with symbols so I know what to convert with find/replace, i.e things I want in <h1> tags are marked like this <p>#text#</p>, or when manually adding <span> tags, any time you have an unclosed tag the xhtml is malformed.

In such a case I would want a way to save my current work-in-progress, perhaps in a custom format to make it clear it's not a valid ePub.

When trying to save, switching to another file in the epub, or even switching from code view to book view, Sigil tells you that the file is malformed and offers to fix it automatically (not recomended) or will take you to the line to fix it manually.

[andyh2000]

Originally Posted by cybmole

go tell that to the guys who make epub reader hardware.

I doubt there is even ONE reader device on the market that can handle raw HTML.

Ectaco jetBook Color for one. Although it's a bit rubbish overall, it does handle a lot of formats including plain HTML.

Andrew