Sigil’s Future Direction (Post 0.4.x)

[mrmikel]

I'm not part of the book pros group, just, as my tag says, a book twiddler. I am 80% book view because I often start with wretched conversions with poor formatting and most of my time is spent just getting it half civilized.

Roger on Sigil constantly meddling with the text inserting its own styles and agree it should not be changing things by default as it does now.

If you could take the current WYSIWYG editor out and shoot it, I think there would be universal applause. It is so cranky. As a Windows person, I personally don't care about cross platform at all, but suspect those from the publishing industry might feel that Mac only might be better! There are so many things it just doesn't do correctly...my latest grrrrr is that you highlight a section of text in book view and select headings and it only does the first part if it is broken by a <br />. Its random selection of text as part of an operation drive me wild.

Although I don't have the skills to write plug ins, it does seem like to way to go to add features without making the program itself gigantic. Some things are needed only by a few, but for those the need is dire to deeply felt. One might be a plug in to address getting rid of page numbers. I know it can be done in regex, but for me it is a hobby thing....repairing industrial electronics is my work thing and enough of a challenge that I don't want to have learn regex to do some fairly common things.

All that said, Sigil is so useful in working with epubs. You can start with junk and end up with something useful and with some real effort (which I seldom do) end up with something great.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As a Windows person, I personally don't care about cross platform at all, but suspect those from the publishing industry might feel that Mac only might be better!

I'm on a Mac. If Sigil were to ever go non-cross platform it would be OS X only.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by charleski

My apologies, I certainly didn't want to besmirch the reputation of the conversion services that do produce quality work, and I have seen some very impressive results from those who are truly professional.

But it's unfortunate, though true, that the 'global leader' in this business is focussed purely on churning out ebooks as fast as possible at the lowest possible price, using cheap and poorly-educated labour in India and China which allows it to offer prices that are almost an order of magnitude lower than some competitors. I won't name names, but type 'ebook conversion France' into Google....

Oh, believe me, I know. And I confess I might have been a bit twee about our process; I do know, though, that you are ABSOLUTELY right, that there are some scum out there, making books. (They're always looking to poach trained people, BTW). And, frankly, there are some total bunglers making them right here in the US; when I read the posts on the KDP, from purported "ebook conversion" persons, I want to scream. There was a guy charging people to make (both epub and mobi), who made all his epubs with Calibre, and had never run an epub through epubcheck, and didn't know how to fix the results when someone did. I was gobsmacked that someone would charge, with that little knowledge, and give "advice" on the forums. He's probably a really nice guy; but if you can't at least write your own ncx, and fix your own epubs, IMHO, you shouldn't be charging to make the bloody things.

I've been trying to round up my own Crew TL's to write down their "processes" for user_none, and if it wasn't so mildly vexing, it would be laughable; they all look at me like I'm Mentally Challenged (of course...they could be right). It's "well...we clean it, we do the elements and CSS, and put it in Sigil to finish." LOL.

So our vagueness is that we really do all the initial heavy lifting in whatever html editor each one of us likes; some of us use NTPro clips to clean; some use Epsilon and mostly use regex; one team is strictly run by a Perl Girl; and then, the one thing we ALL do, is use Sigil (and then we have three different ways that mobi's get made, too). I guess we're not very IBM around here, but it works, at least, at this volume, which is +/-150 books/month. If things keep increasing at the rate that they have the last year, that may change.

Best,
Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by user_none

I'm on a Mac. If Sigil were to ever go non-cross platform it would be OS X only.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!




H.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by user_none

I'm on a Mac. If Sigil were to ever go non-cross platform it would be OS X only.

how depressing

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by alansplace

how depressing

Hopefully it was a big hypothetical IF.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Hopefully it was a big hypothetical IF.

Well, I have no plans to make Sigil non-cross platform. But people keep bringing it up...

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by user_none

Well, I have no plans to make Sigil non-cross platform. But people keep bringing it up...

yes, some people are quite selfish (not you, heaven forbid). If they don't happen to need something then they think no effort should be expended on that item. I am always amazed at abject selfishness exhibited by people on free software.

Dale

[JSWolf]

Can someone please figure out how to get Sigil to not run on computers of the people who are being selfish?

[st_albert]

I'm finding this discussion fascinating, and, I think, important. I'm one of those power users who works for a small publisher of both print and ebooks (mostly novels), and my job is to produce the ebooks in whatever format is needed. Mostly, that's epub and mobi.

If the book is under contract for print, I start with the "final, print-ready" InDesign4 file and export to epub. If the contract is ebook-only, I usually start with an rtf file and convert that to epub using either LibreOffice writer2epub, writer2xhtml, or Atlantis. Mostly I work on Linux, using Windows or OS-X only when the tools require it.

The initial export to epub is only to create the epub package with minimal effort. The files are then unpacked, and the xhtml and css are cleaned up, sigil chapter breaks are inserted, and so on. After re-packing, the file is fed to Sigil for the final polish: chapter splits, additional metadata, <guide> semantics, error checking, and so on. A second modified epub is produced for conversion to mobi via kindlegen.

I spend most of my time in Code View, and use Book View as a previewer to see that my changes do what I want, not merely what I told it to do.

Note that just because I don't write the entire book from scratch in Sigil, does not make Sigil "an afterthought." It is essential.

That said, here are my thoughs on the future of Sigil.

For me, the Big Thing of version 0.4 was the ability to edit content.opf. That really saves me lots of time. And, of the features proposed for 0.5, the Big Thing would be PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions). Since the files I start with have seen multiple editors and proofreaders before I get them, a spell-checker would not add much value in my case.

Further out, I really like the idea of plugins. I can think of a few I'd like to see, such as a mobipocket expander and repackager that would allow sigil to tweak mobi files; or something to help clean up the CSS; or how about a little plugin to read toc.ncx and construct an inline TOC.xhtml for those who want one. (I know, not you, JSWolf )

I do find the current Sigil's automatic modification of the epub files and structure to be mildly annoying at times, though I've grown used to it and can work with it. If there could be a preference panel that would allow one to turn that feature on or off (along with Tidy, and the well-formed checker) that would be great, but not essential IMHO. I typically run with Tidy turned off, and find that it helps. Probably making these things plugins that can be run manually when desired would be good, as you suggested.

As for the internals, I am surely not qualified to comment there. But I would agree that python is probably the best choice for a plugin language, of those listed, unless it REALLY causes a performance hit.

Well, I'll stop rambling now, but not without saying once again how much I appreciate your efforts!

[user_none]

Originally Posted by st_albert

As for the internals, I am surely not qualified to comment there. But I would agree that python is probably the best choice for a plugin language, of those listed, unless it REALLY causes a performance hit.

Having plugins won't introduce a large penalty. The only performance hit would be in starting Sigil as it would have to load (or index) the plugins. As with any plugin system, the more plugins you have the longer this will take.

Where you would see a performance penalty would be the speed of the language. A C++ plugin will run much faster than a Python plugin. However, you will only notice this if you were to run a C++ plugin then a Python one that does the exact same thing.

[StevenLin]

Curious: as html5 and css3 have been announced, when the new Sigil incoporate them?

Because I will be using Sigil to convert the older issues of our Japanese magazine, so I really look forward to a new Sigil that will allow me to create the Japanese e-magazine in the traditional Oriental verticle style.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by StevenLin

Curious: as html5 and css3 have been announced, when the new Sigil incoporate them?

Announced is one thing being incorporated into the spec is another. Right now EPUB 3 is still in draft status. I'm not even going to think about EPUB 3 until it's finalized. Also, it will still be some time before EPUB 3 makes it to Sigil simply because when it is ratified the vast majority of devices on the market won't support it.

Right now Apple's iBooks is the only thing that supports HTML5 and CSS3. However, this is at the expense of creating non-compliant files that are only guaranteed to work in iBooks. I'm not about to add support for Apple's non-standard, industry destroying, money grubbing practices.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by user_none

I'm not about to add support for Apple's non-standard, industry destroying, money grubbing practices.

Hear hear!

[crutledge]

A so called mythical PREFERENCES window has been discussed in this forum and promised by Vallorick for a long time.

I think that it could be initiated in Ver. 5.

Things such as Sigil font size, the display font, selections for error checking and anything else that controls Sigil's look and feel. I'm sure that a laundry list of items would be proposed by the viewers of this forum.

Charlie