Plugin Development

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Jaco

I think this plugin could be useful.

My collection of clips is so large that if something goes wrong and I lose them, I'm in trouble. This plugin backs up and restores clips. I've put it here because I'm not sure where else to upload it. It's available in Spanish and English, and you're free to improve anything that's wrong. I've never programmed before.

Enjoy it!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already determined that the export (and loading) of clips is already a part of Sigil's built-in feature set? We mentioned that when you asked about this in the new feature requests thread, I believe.

[Doitsu]

It would be helpful if someone added new functions to bk.hspell that allow the user to load the primary and secondary spellcheck dictionaries.

So far, the only method to get these paths is to parse sigil_v6.ini.

For example, you could add loadPrimaryDictionary and loadSecondaryDictionary methods to bk.hspell.

If en-US is the primary spellcheck dictinary.:

bk.hspell.loadPrimaryDictionary()

would be the equivalent of:

aff_file = r"C:\Program Files\Sigil\hunspell_dictionaries\en_US.aff"
dic_file = r"C:\Program Files\Sigil\hunspell_dictionaries\en_US.dic"
bk.hspell.loadDictionary(aff_file, dic_file)

[KevinH]

First, the path to the dictionary dirs is already available to the plugins see dictionary_dirs so no reason to hard code them. All available spellcheck languages can be gathered from those dirs.

class BookContainer(object):

    def __init__(self, wrapper, debug=False):
        self._debug = debug
        self._w = wrapper
        self.qp = QuickXHTMLParser()
        self.hspell = HunspellChecker(wrapper.get_hunspell_path())
        self.dictionary_dirs = wrapper.get_dictionary_dirs()
        self._prefs_store = JSONPrefs(wrapper.plugin_dir, wrapper.plugin_name)

Second, wouldn't it be better to pick the dictionaries to be used directly based on the lang or xml:lang of the xhtml actually being processed and not based on Sigil current settings?

Extracting the primary language from the html tag should be trivial.

If that does not work for you let me know and we can extend the set of information passed to the plugin even further but it is already pretty long now.

Please give that a try first.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

First, the path to the dictionary dirs is already available to the plugins see dictionary_dirs so no reason to hard code them.

I'm aware of this fact. I wasn't asking about the dictionary dirs. I wanted to know if was possible to get the paths to the dictionaries selected as primary and secondary dictionaries.

Originally Posted by KevinH

Second, wouldn't it be better to pick the dictionaries to be used directly based on the lang or xml:lang of the xhtml actually being processed and not based on Sigil current settings?

Using the (X)HTML language attributes is not a reliable method, because not all epubs have them and primary and secondary dictionaries can be selected from the program and user folders.

Originally Posted by KevinH

If that does not work for you let me know and we can extend the set of information passed to the plugin even further but it is already pretty long now.

Apparenlty, I underestimated the difficulty of implementing this request. I'll simply continue using my current .ini based method. I.e., retrieving dictionary_name and secondary_dictionary_name from sigil_v6.ini.

[KevinH]

No, you misunderstand. It is not difficult, but if the xhtml files do not have lang or xml:lang, then surely the opf can be used to get the language of the text (both primary and secondary from existing dc:language metadata tags) as needed.

So my reluctance is to change a long standing api for something that can be extracted locally from the epub itself and be more accurate that what the user defaulted to.

That is what is done inside Sigil when a full spellcheck dialog is used. It uses the actual language tags and fallsback to the opf. Only the on the fly red-squiggly spellcheck version uses primary and secondary for pure speed.

I would be happy to create a python snippet to use the opf to determine primary and secondary languages which when combined with the dictionary_dirs list if that would help instead.

I am just loathe to change a minimalist interface (designed that way on purpose) to add things that can be derived in better ways inside the plugin (and I do not mean parsing the sigil ini files here).

If not, then let me know and I will add that requested interface when I get some free time and it will be available in a future version of Sigil.

But it kind of defeats that minimalist design approach to interface to a plugin which is why I was so hesitant.