What Features or Tools does Sigil Still Need Yet?

[KevinH]

When you say a custom dictionary, are you talking about a custom wordlist (user wordlist) or a full fledged en_US sized hunspell dictionary.

If the latter, give it an unused language code - region and then set the default epub language to that language code - region. Use that same langcode-region for all that authors books.

Alternatively, I set up separate login/userids when working on specific projects and can therefore install whatever user-dictionaries I want for Sigil under that user id. That actually help keep different client files completely separate. I do this when clean-rooming code for different project that have incompatible software licenses.

[KevinH]

Okay, for those who build from master on macOS, Windows, or Linux.

I have changed the MetaEditor to use a Human Readable form and added back Delegate to allow ComboBox selection of elements right in the Tree.

This is all experimental, but from initial testing the new MetaEditor at least seems to work on my machine.

I would love to hear feedback in any form. It is now very close to what we had in the old days in that is is more human readable and uses pulldowns to set things. It still differs considerable between epub2 and epub3 but there is no way around that.

There is no large Description box, but the original MetaEditor did not have one either.

The added advantage of this version is that the values are order adjustable and order does matter for authors, titles, languages, etc.

Hope this is an improvement.

I plan to add a plugin based off of Dotisu's that can edit just the basic Metadata for both epub2 and epub3 such as primary title, primary author, primary language, description, and subject sometime in the future unless Doitsu or someone else beats me to it.

Thoughts and feedback including bug reports welcome.

Kevin

[BeckyEbook]

I apologize in advance if my text below is incomprehensible.

Well, I don't like the proposed changes.
Why?
1. The first column is translated, which is partly cool and partly not.
Cool, because for beginners the "Language" or "Title" view is more friendly.
Not cool because: the column is editable and that can make the metadata totally messy once you start editing those translated names. For this, the user needs to know how the meta tags were translated.

2. Although it was the same before – editing a long description in this form is a chore.

3. If the description is much longer than the width of the metadata editing window, the change of the value from the drop-down list (eg language) is displayed on the whole screen. Even with a normal window width, the width of all these dropdown lists is very wide. Additionally, with a long description, the first column is still hidden and we have to scroll the window horizontally.

4. How do I set up a custom schema for an identifier (eg MOBI-ASIN or BeckyBook or BookstoreName) since it can only be selected from the drop-down list?

5. EPUB2: Date with the "modification" event – if you click it, it proposes only codes from "dc:date-".

DiapDealer's solution – direct OPF file editing – not so bad

Becky

[KevinH]

Doitsu noticed many of the same things.

I have now blocked editing of element names and property names so that they can not be changed by the user, only the values associated with them can be changed. This has not been pushed yet.

I added MOBI-ASIN as a known identifier type so we would support DOI, ISBN, ISSN, UUID and MOBI-ASIN.

And I am trying to create a better dc:description delegate.

I will look into the modification date bug in epub2. There may be many bugs in epub2, as I have focused my testing only on epub3 since it is a much more complicated case.

Yes if your translations of Roles or Languages are very long you will need to grow the width of the Meta-Editor.

Yes, Advanced Users could directly edit the opf. The role of the MetaEditor is to give more novice users and users who for good reason do not like editing the opf a chance to make basic changes.

FWIW, your base of comparison should be the current Meta-Editor in Sigil 1.4.3.

So, just to be clear, are you saying this version (aside from the epub2 bug) is worse that the version in Sigil-1.4.3 for the majority of users?

[KevinH]

@Doitsu and @BeckyEbook,

Please grab from master and try the MetaEditor again. I have made the following changes:

- Allowed rows to have differing height
- set a fixed size limit for values that can be expanded
- turned on word-wrap for values so they wrap at the whatever column width you have
- used a QTextEdit to handle the dc:description editing via a special ItemDelegate just for that tag
- tried to fix the bugs reported in dc:date- and others but I am sure many more exist.
- locked Element Names and Property Names from user editing.

There is still more work to do but I think this is getting closer.

Please give this one a try.

I have attached a screenshot showing editing a longer Description in action.

If you think this is an improvement and worth bug hunting and fixing on, please let me know and I will use Sigil's ci to build a pre-release version of Sigil for other interested parties to try out and report feedback and bugs on.

[BeckyEbook]

Originally Posted by KevinH

FWIW, your base of comparison should be the current Meta-Editor in Sigil 1.4.3.

Sure.

Originally Posted by KevinH

So, just to be clear, are you saying this version (aside from the epub2 bug) is worse that the version in Sigil-1.4.3 for the majority of users?

Hmmm… In the version from yesterday – IMHO – yes. Especially for non-English speaking people.

If there were additional tooltips for entries in table cells in the metadata editor – then I would definitely be in favor of the new version. In the tooltips, I imagine real strings that are actually in the metadata.

Then the editor will be friendlier both for beginners and for those more advanced in the metadata structure.

Of course, I'd love to hear from other users.

Becky

EDIT: Immediately I build the new version.

[BeckyEbook]

I built.

It's better than yesterday. I can confirm that editing metadata is now much more enjoyable. All the changes you mentioned in the previous post are great.

My previous note about tooltips remains valid.

Becky

[KevinH]

The tooltips are going to be a bit of a pain as we use our own from scratch TreeItem and so I have to teach it to properly store and retrieve values for each item and tooltips for each item and then figure out a way to load both in parallel.

This will take some work.

[KevinH]

Okay, the complete code is a mess of spaghetti now but I have shoehorned in the setting of codes as tooltips.

I have just now pushed all of this to master.

If people think this is useful in general, I can rewrite the code with all of the changes and things we have added properly redesigned and not just a thrown together mishmash.

@BeckyEbook is this somewhat close to what you were suggesting.

Expect bugs!

[DNSB]

The latest Metadata Editor looks pretty decent to me. Though I must admit, that majority of my metadata edits have been done directly on the content.opf file.

[BeckyEbook]

It's OK for me.

This is what it looks like now.

[KevinH]

I need help with understanding the most common way to assign a dc:identifier when it is an Amazon/Mobi ASIN under both epub2 and epub3.

So how does one properly set metadata when using an Amazon asin as an identifier:

Epub2

<dc:identifier opf:scheme="MOBI-ASIN">B005IEGK5C</dc:identifier>

Is that correct? Or is the opf:scheme set to "ASIN" or "mobi-asin", "asin" or something else?

And for epub3, which of these is most commonly used (and with "MOBI-ASIN", "ASIN", "asin" or "mobi-asin"?

<dc:identifier id="myid">B005IEGK5C</dc:identifier>
<meta refines="#myid" property="identifier-type">MOBI-ASIN</meta>

Or

<dc:identifier id="myid">"urn:asin:B005IEGK5C</dc:identifier>

or

<dc:identifier>"urn:mobi-asin:B005IEGK5C</dc:identifier>

or something else?

I would very very much like to keep this in sync with what Calibre uses when faced with this task under both epub2 and epub3.

So any help or guidance here would be greatly appreciated. As this is xml, case definitely matters so please be specific.


Thanks to anyone who has epub2 and epub3 versions of mobis in their calibre library who can check on this for me or from book developers on what they typically used when faced with the same thing.

[KevinH]

Or perhaps it is just set as regular metadata:

<meta name="MOBI-ASIN" content="B005IEGK5C" />

or its equivalent under epub3

<meta property="MOBI-ASIN">B005IEGK5C</meta>

[DNSB]

The only times I see the mobi-asin in the content.opf, the format is either:

<dc:identifier>mobi-asin:B08TB4XYR6</dc:identifier

<meta name="ASIN" content="B08TB4XYR6" />

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The only times I see the mobi-asin in the content.opf, the format is either:

<dc:identifier>mobi-asin:B08TB4XYR6</dc:identifier

<meta name="ASIN" content="B08TB4XYR6" />

Good to know! I will modify our metadata editor to create the first form for epub 3, and the second form for epub2.

Thank you!