Sigil, the ePub editor

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Sadhu

I've been trying to convert a book displays properly in Word and Acrobat

What format is it in when you view it in Word?

Originally Posted by Sadhu

I began by removing all footers an d page numbers from the original document, and then removed all hard page breaks except for the page before a new chapter (there are four chapters, and three hard page breaks). What surprised me was the when proofing the iBook (ePub), not only didn't the chapters always break properly

This is a good start. Chapter breaks in ePubs seem to be often used/inserted to ensure that no single html file within the epub is larger then the 300k limit. Otherwise many ePub renderers will not be able to read the file.

Originally Posted by Sadhu

Very disheartened by this, since Word and Acrobat have no code to make visible to find what is causing all this havoc.

In Word you have to reveal "Show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols" this is done by pressing [cntr-shift-*] to toggle the view. Or to reveal the formatting marks go to the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click Show/Hide button to the right of Sort.

You will see a bunch of paragraph marks causing the hard line breaks. When I have text like this I use My TXT Cleaner an extension for Open Office.org Writer program.

Quoted from the web page. (English version scroll down the page)

Do you have problems with
texts having unwanted
line breaks like
this one?

This happens because there are some unwanted paragraph marks along the text. If we take the text from a PDF, inevitably we will get a paragraph mark at each end of line.

Now, or you delete them one by one with a lot of patience, or you can use the macro MyTXTcleaner that will do the work for you.

How does it work?
My TXT Cleaner removes all of the paragraph marks following lowercase letters, commas and semicolons. This because it is assumed that a paragraph usually don’t ends with a letter …

[Fabe]

Valloric, Thank you for creating Sigil. Currently I use it for one thing, to generate an epub file from my html. It works like a charm. Thank you. I have only one pet peeve, Command-H does not close the program on my Mac. it brings up the Find window. This is a real stone in my shoe. Why don't I just go barefoot? Good question. :-) Thanks again, Sigil is a great program. I know a lot of work has and is going into it. - Fabe

[pietvo]

I agree on the Command-H issue.

[sjkramer]

Ha! I thought I was alone on the Command + H peeve. I didn't want to mention it because Valloric has so much else on his plate. But since you do...I'm sure he will say to make a formal feature request here. So one of us should!

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by sjkramer

Ha! I thought I was alone on the Command + H peeve. I didn't want to mention it because Valloric has so much else on his plate. But since you do...I'm sure he will say to make a formal feature request here. So one of us should!

That shortcut is unlikely to change. When I was picking keyboard shortcuts, I took the time to carefully analyze what other major applications were using. The most important of which was certainly Microsoft Word: it's the text editor of the world. I know a lot of people don't like it, but there it is. Word is the industry standard word processor.

So picking the same keyboard shortcuts as Word makes using Sigil more familiar to people who have used Word.

And Word uses CTRL+H for opening the Replace dialog on Windows.

It's possible to make the keyboard shortcut selection platform dependent, so that different shortcuts map to different things on different platforms. But frankly, I'm against that approach.

Qt provides a large list of StandardKeys that automatically remap themselves on different platforms. Using these is easy when all you need are the shortcuts listed. But creating your own application-specific shortcuts (of which Sigil has a large amount) while using StandardKeys... well it means you have to keep track of all the possible combinations and mappings to not accidentally step on something that's already in use.

Do note that there are about a 100 different combinations on that list. They all cross-wire in strange ways. And these are only the ones that Qt provides. The combinatorial explosion goes sky-high when you add the other actions with shortcuts that differ on various platforms.

Taking care of such a large remapping system would be tedious and frustrating.

So Command-H will sadly have to stay where it is.

(Qt remaps all CTRL-specified shortcuts to Command)

[pietvo]

I looked into that Qt table and it says that Replace on Windows is already mapped from Ctrl+H, but on Mac OS X it is not. The other exception is that on KDE it is mapped from Ctrl+R. I would suppose that is because on KDE Ctrl+R is the preferred key combination for replace.

So to get Cmd+H to map to Replace you need to do something special in the Sigil code. To keep the original Mac OS X behaviour (Cmd+H mapped to Hide Sigil) you don't need anything special. Is that correct?

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by pietvo

So to get Cmd+H to map to Replace you need to do something special in the Sigil code. To keep the original Mac OS X behaviour (Cmd+H mapped to Hide Sigil) you don't need anything special. Is that correct?

Cmd+H itself is not the issue, the point is that I'm either going to do platform-specific shortcuts in general (including Cmd+H) or I'm not. I've decided not to since the cons outweigh the pros, IMO.

[meika]

CMD-H to hide the current application is standard in the Appleland GUI strictures across all applications.

It really interrupts workflow on a mac when I hit CMD-H. It's srsly forehead smacking stuff.

When BBedit faced the same issue they allowed the user to decide which it should be with a dialogue on intial load of app, and in preferences.

[Valloric]

The shortcut for opening the Replace dialog on Macs is now Cmd+Shift+F. Cmd+H is left to the OS and now works as expected.

[FizzyWater]

Does this mean there'll be a new update soon?

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Does this mean there'll be a new update soon?

Possibly.

[seajewel]

Is it possible to remove lines between paragraphs in any simple manner using Sigil? I know Calibre can do this, but it also does a few things that I do not like, and I was wondering if I could do this more hands-on with Sigil. I could of course convert and remove lines with Calibre and then fix the issues caused by the conversion in Sigil, but I was wondering if I could just select blocks of text, within a scene or a chapter for instance, and remove lines.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by seajewel

but I was wondering if I could just select blocks of text, within a scene or a chapter for instance, and remove lines.

You can do it, but how easy it will be will depend on how the lines are inserted between paragraphs.

Calibre, and others often create that space by adding a .5em margin above and below each paragraph via the CSS. If you remove these margins you remove the spaces between all objects of the same class paragraph.

Some epubs have breaks between lines hard coded with back to back line breaks every place they want a space between paragraphs.

<br /><br />

or

<p>&nbsp;</p>

A non-breaking space in a paragraph to take up a line.

You can adjust the CSS in Sigil and you can find and replace the others. It is just a matter of figuring out how the document you're looking to fine tune handles these spaces.

[seajewel]

In the book I was trying to edit, it was just </p> empty line <p> .. I suppose whether Calibre handles removing line breaks properly and indentation depends on whether the ebook was "coded" properly..

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by seajewel

I suppose whether Calibre handles removing line breaks properly and indentation depends on whether the ebook was "coded" properly..

Calibre is not a editor so as a rule it tries not to change the html. That said, so many people either wanted no spaces between paragraphs or wanted spaces between paragraphs that Kovid added those options. The result are sweeping changes if you use either option. It is not a matter of calibre handling removing line breaks properly, the program does certain things and hopes for the best.

You are correct, a well coded ebook will convert fine without either option set.

I love the fact the he supplied these simple options for all of us that don't want to get into the weeds.

I like having a certain font size, a standard indent and a space between my paragraphs. I also deal with some ebooks of questionable origin. Because of this I just default to having both options set. I check remove spaces between paragraph, set the indent to 1.1em, and set insert blank line to put the space back between the paragraphs.