New Features or Improvements post Sigil 2.8.1

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Quite a few of the books I edit now are for authors for whom accessibility is becoming more of an issue. If you take a look at Amazon or Kobo, both now have accessibility information for ebooks highly visible in the book's listing. For those ePubs, I do need to create properly formatted headers, have decent alt="" for images, etc. For books intended for my personal use, being able to directly edit ToC entries might be useful but would require me to break a few habits I've established over the last few years and not use the various saved searches I've created.

Text formatting adjustments can be considered rubbish. If one of the adjustments I was to need was to reduce the line height smaller then Amazon allows, then that's not accessible.

[KevinH]

MacOS has built-in support for avif and jpeg-xl images starting with Mac OS Sonoma.

KDE on Linux supports both including their own kde/qt plugins if both libjxl and libavif are installed.

I have no idea about Windows support.

Update: Both are supported in Windows 11 if you add the correct Windows store system extensions.

So to say this is a bit bleeding edge for use in an epub is a huge understatement!

I agree with Kovid, the epub format committee must be a bit out of their minds!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

The W3C added two new core media types in the EPUB 3.4 specs.

image/avif sample file
image/jxl sample file

I haven't seen them in the wild, but it could hurt to add support for them in the image viewer window if Qt supports them.

Is there any advantage to using the image types in eBooks?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Sigil already recognizes those new image media types.

For good measure you also might want to add them to ext_mime_map in hrefutils.py.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Is there any advantage to using the image types in eBooks?

Theoretically, they could significantly reduce the overall file size of epubs with lots of large high resolution images.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

For good measure you also might want to add them to ext_mime_map in hrefutils.py.

Theoretically, they could significantly reduce the overall file size of epubs with lots of large high resolution images.

Will do. Thanks for the head's up.

[KevinH]

But on the downside the avif requires a large codex library to pack and unpack those images. Not sure about jpeg-xl

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Update: Both are supported in Windows 11 if you add the correct Windows store system extensions.

Windows 10: the built-in 'Photos' app supports avif files, don't recall having to download anything, part of the furniture. And according to W10:Settings it also supports 'jxl (jpeg-xl)' files.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

The W3C added two new core media types in the EPUB 3.4 specs.

image/avif sample file
image/jxl sample file

I haven't seen them in the wild, but it could hurt to add support for them in the image viewer window if Qt supports them.

One of my dodgy site blockers doesn't like those links to samples.

The images in the Guardian download as avif files.

BR

[KevinH]

avif you mean right?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by KevinH

avif you mean right?

Yep - corrected.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Yep - corrected.

I meant at the OS level as part of the Windows standard libraries. Any app can link in those new image libraries, and any plugin code, but if the libraries and headers are supplied by the operating system level, they could be directly linked to the app itself with no duplication needed.

I only reported what google said when asked if Windows 11 has builtin support at the OS level for avif and jxl. I just never use Windows at all unless absolutely forced to (read that Canadian Income Tax software!).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Text formatting adjustments can be considered rubbish. If one of the adjustments I was to need was to reduce the line height smaller then Amazon allows, then that's not accessible.

Out of a perhaps morbid curiosity, what does line height in Amazon format ebooks have to do with ToC creation/modification in Sigil? Or handling accessibilty requirements?

Perhaps you could suggest how to create a modification to a future edition of Sigil that will allow bypassing that baked into the renderer minimum line height used by Amazon ebooks?

[celiapgt]

To be able to dock the Validation Results to the same panel as Preview panel.

[KevinH]

Validation results need to be long and not tall (long error messages from epubcheck along with file path, info and row and column info). So it is best docked at the top or bottom of Sigil's MainWindow.

What advantage would exist by using it to take up Preview's space on the right?

What is wrong with it being at the top or bottom of the MainWindow?

All people who suggest new features should explain at the very minimum how implementing them would help them *and* the majority of Sigil users.

[theducks]

OK here is an odd one.
I would like the ability to rename Images from Reports (you can delete) and thier usages.
Why?
Because it would be the first step when a book only uses Images for chapter headings.
Step 1: Rename
Step 2: Generate an alt= or title= from the name using REGEX
Step3 rebuild the TOC
Not all images were named in order. Reports shows a thumbnail

[KevinH]

The Reports are actually generated from a snapshot of an epub at one particular time. Deleting involves two changes: removing the file and updating the opf manifest. Renaming an image involves updating the opf manifest then searching the entire set of svg, css, and xhtml files to update any links to that image accordingly. This coupled with the need to rerun all reports at the same time, would be a horribly slow process.

If what you really want is a way to set the alt or title of an image based on its thumbnail (for later processing with a regex) where you can see all thumbnails at once, you would be much better off with a plugin. My AccessAide plugin already has the ability to show thumbnails of every image and allows the user to easily edit the alt attribute assigned to that image.

It could easily be extracted into its own plugin and modified to instead add a title attribute to a parent heading tag or any other image related change based on thumbnails - without requiring image file renaming (and the associated search to update any links to it) nor the constant rebuilding of Reports.

So I think a plugin would be best here. Please try running my Access-Aide plugin and look at the alt renaming gui interface and see if something along those lines might be made to do what you need if split out into its own plugin.