Suggestions for New Plugins and Plugin Improvements

[KevinH]

Hi All,

If you have suggestions that would improve an existing Sigil plugin or ideas for new Sigil plugins, we would be happy to hear them. Note, third party plugin developers completely control their own plugins so we can not guarantee your suggestion will be implemented, but it does not hurt to ask.

Ideas for new Sigil plugins that will benefit the vast majority of users always welcome.

Thanks,

[kawayama]

Would it be possible to make that plugin that could
rename the selected text files based on the first headline in the file?

Let's say you have a collection of short stories, all with filenames like "split0001" etc, and you want them to be named after the short story in the file, "AShortStoryTitle".

It would make it easier to reorder the stories.

[KevinH]

The only problem is that changing file names means searching for and changing any links to it in the OPF, TOC, and of course in all xhtml files that might link to it. Sigil itself has concurrent threads that does this job and a whole module of code in C++ for just that purpose. No one has written its equivalent in a Sigil plugin. To do it right takes some real work. It looks like a simple change, but renaming files properly means breaking links/urls that break things like endnotes, urls, etc. Especially when you consider that identically named files may exist in an epub as long as they are in different folders. This happens a lot when compendium epubs are generated from many books.

[KevinH]

You can of course use Sigil's built in Regex Rename to select a bunch of adjacent split files and of capture the number part of the name and add a new prefix to replace the "split " with something more meaningful. This is doable in Sigil right now.

[Capricorn]

Sometimes, when I run the epubcheck plugin, there is an erorr that tells me I have to add properties="svg" to the titlepage entry in the opf file, when the image in the titlepage is defined as <svg>.

It does not seem to be an important error, because the epub still works on my ebook reader, when I leave the error as is.

However, this error still annoys me, and I like to remove it. Unfortunately, a regex does not help, as I need to check if an svg tag is present in the titlepage. So, a plugin would be very helpful.

I do not know if many people have encountered this error. And I do not know how diificult it would be to programm such a plugin.

It would be nice to have the option to automatically change this.

[KevinH]

Yes, adding "svg" as a manifest property for epub3 can easily be done in Sigil, no need for a Plugin. See the Sigil: Tools -> Epub3 Tools -> Update Manifest Properties menu item.

This tool need only be run once before final verification of your epub, and will walk all the epub's files and look for missing or extraneous manifest properties, and fix them. Things like missing svg, script, math, and remote OPF manifest properties that are required by the epub3 spec. It has long been part of Sigil since epub3 support was first added.

[Capricorn]

Oh man.....this is cool.
If I had known about it before.....
I recently thought my knowledge was slowly getting to a decent point...........what a mistake.....
I definitely need to dive deeper into all the functionality of Sigil. Learning by doing.

Thank you for pointing out this tool.