The pros and cons of Sigil

[slowsmile]

Features that I particularly like in Sigil - in no particular order:

1. Clip Editor

2 Mend and Prettify

3. TOC creation and generation tool(It's good but Calibre's TOC editor is better)

4. Special Characters(Good for resolving mixed encoding problems causing gibberish text)

5. W3C stylesheet Check

6. Vast array of useful Sigil Plugins

7. Index editor

8. Text/HTML view

9. Simple file split/merge capability.

10. Inserting files and images.

11. Very good search and replace.

Things I don't like about Sigil:

1. Poor Sigil Help Guide Support. The last time the help guide was updated in the Git repository was 2 yrs ago. The online Sigil Guide has also gone walkabout.

2. Poor Metadata editor. It's clunky and easy to make a mistake using this editor. I now use a free and fast epub metadata editor called Epub Metadata Editor -- with a very plain dialog that has every possible meta entry you could wish for.

3. Only inserts a book cover images as SVG. It would be nice to have a tick box option to insert the cover image as a plain old HTML <img>. Older Kindle mobi7s cannot display SVG images.

[DiapDealer]

If you're having trouble editing a post (or creating a new thread), please ask for help. I'm going to delete two of your triplicate posts and move the other to its own thread since it's not really relevant to the thread it was posted in.

[slowsmile]

Sorry about that.

[theducks]

You can still use the Insert Image tool to build a COVER file

then use the Semantics tool to flag the HTML file and the cover image files as COVER (both need to be done)

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

Things I don't like about Sigil:
1. Poor Sigil Help Guide Support. The last time the help guide was updated in the Git repository was 2 yrs ago. The online Sigil Guide has also gone walkabout.

We are always looking for volunteers to update this. If you are interested, we would welcome the help.

KevinH

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

2. Poor Metadata editor. It's clunky and easy to make a mistake using this editor. I now use a free and fast epub metadata editor called Epub Metadata Editor -- with a very plain dialog that has every possible meta entry you could wish for.

This interface design is almost required for epub3 metadata which is much more flexible and can be extended with user specific attributes. So there is no way for all possible metadata entries to be given in a general list for epub3. Any interface that claims to do that in some way must limit epub3 metadata possibilities.

The user interface for epub2 metadata followed that design so that users do not have to learn two different interfaces.

As always github pull requests that do not limit epub3 metadata that still work for epub2's much more limited metadata welcomed.

KevinH

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by theducks

You can still use the Insert Image tool to build a COVER file

then use the Semantics tool to flag the HTML file and the cover image files as COVER (both need to be done)

Yes--which is, to this day, still the way we do it. Works great.

Hitch'

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

1. Poor Sigil Help Guide Support. The last time the help guide was updated in the Git repository was 2 yrs ago. The online Sigil Guide has also gone walkabout.

Do you have any examples of particularly bad portions of the guide?

I can't really think of anything major that has changed besides Plugins + very basic EPUB3 support + a handful of different Preferences (Tidy/Mend). Although I must admit, I haven't looked at the Guide in a very long time.

Originally Posted by theducks

Then use the Semantics tool to flag the HTML file and the cover image files as COVER (both need to be done)

The Sigil 0.8.6 Add Semantics used to have a little checkmark, which made it really helpful to see if a given HTML file already had semantics attached to it.



The Sigil 0.9.6 Add Semantics is missing any sort of indication from what I could tell:

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

The Sigil 0.9.6 Add Semantics is missing any sort of indication from what I could tell:

Assigned Semantics attributes are being displayed when you move the mouse pointer over a file in the Book Browser.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Assigned Semantics attributes are being displayed when you move the mouse pointer over a file in the Book Browser.

It's also in Reports->All Files, not the most convenient place but has the advantage you can see all the files and their semantics as a list.

BR

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Assigned Semantics attributes are being displayed when you move the mouse pointer over a file in the Book Browser.

Ah, I wondered where the checkmarks had gone! Thankee.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Assigned Semantics attributes are being displayed when you move the mouse pointer over a file in the Book Browser.

It would still be nice to have the "Add Semantic" dialog box start with the selection set to the current semantic assigned.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

It would still be nice to have the "Add Semantic" dialog box start with the selection set to the current semantic assigned.

Honestly, why? In order to set a semantic, you have to mouse over it in the Bookbrowser which will show you what it is set to. You would only invoke the set semantics to actually change it and that makes the last set value rather meaningless, doesn't it.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Honestly, why? In order to set asemantic, you have to mouse over it in the Bookbrowser which will show you what it is set to.

Side Note: I use Sigil every single day for hours a day... and I had NO IDEA the "hover to see semantics" even existed until Doitsu just mentioned it the other day.

Side Note #2: I have now also learned from BetterRed that you can also see all of the Semantics as a column in Tools -> Reports -> All Files. While ok for someone technical like me, this isn't a very quick/user friendly position at all.

Originally Posted by KevinH

You would only invoke the set semantics to actually change it and that makes the last set value rather meaningless, doesn't it.

I agree with nabsltd. The Sigil 0.9 redo of the Add Semantics is a giant step backwards. It becomes hard to tell at a glance whether you are turning a given Semantic ON or OFF.

That little checkmark was also really helpful when you were working on a book from an outside source (I could quickly just right click and visually see the Cover/others were assigned properly).

Sigil 0.8.6:

• Has cover.xhtml, TOC.xhtml, etc. etc.
• I right click -> Add Semantics
  
  • This file had a correctly assigned Cover semantic
    
    • See the little checkmark on "Cover"
      
    • Oh, great, this is already correctly given a Cover! I don't need to touch a thing!
  • This file did not have a correctly assigned Cover semantic
    
    • No little checkmark on "Cover"
      
    • Click "Cover". Problem solved.

At a quick glance, you can see which semantics are already assigned to the file (if any):



Sigil 0.9.6:

• Have cover.xhtml
• I right click -> Add Semantics
  
  • This file had a correctly assigned Cover semantic
    
    • I have no idea if it has a correctly assigned Cover or not. So I push "Cover".
      
    • The Cover semantic GETS UNASSIGNED.
      
    • I continue to go about my business, believing I set the Cover properly, when I actually did the exact opposite.
      
    • If I right click -> Add Semantics again (maybe days/weeks later), I have NO CLUE if Cover is actually On/Off/What.
  • This file did not have a Cover Semantic
    
    • I push "Cover" and hoped it got assigned correctly.
      
    • Side Note: The first three or four times I did this in Sigil 0.9, I actually went looking in the content.opf. Luckily I know what code to look for to see if semantics were assigned correctly.

Relying on the Hover Method only is also very confusing, ESPECIALLY when dealing with the very common filenames that Sigil creates: "cover.xhtml" + "TOC.xhtml":



"cover.xhtml (Cover)" + "TOC.xhtml (Table of Contents)"

... You are telling me THAT is better than the easy-to-understand ol' checkmark image above?

And with a very long filename:



the semantics just get lost. If I didn't know what to look for thanks to Doitsu, I would have NO CLUE that "(Table of Contents)" was the semantic for that file.

Side Note: And who would recognize those more obscure semantics if they were in parentheses (Colophon, Epigraph, [...]). I sure wouldn't.

[KevinH]

You can see the entire set in the content.opf in epub 2, in the nav in epub3, in the report for both epub2 and epub3 and by simply mousing over the list of files in the BookBrowser.

BTW: The mousing over approach has always worked that way. And the toggle on toggle off has always has worked that way as well.

Invoking set semantic just to check what is set in simply not the correct approach. It is just the one you are used too. Semantics under epub3 are a much longer list that can not be set or displayed with a simple menu as the older limited epub2 semantics used.

Sorry, I am simply do not think that change is useful or worthwhile.

KevinH