eBook Formatting in Sigil

[exaltedwombat]

I've just looked at the beginning of Guido Henkel's book, and at his blog:
http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-...ok-formatting/

Can't say I'm very impressed. He's purporting to 'solve' a lot of problems that would never arise in a document properly laid out in a word processor. And if you can't cope with paragraph and header styles in a WP, how are you suddenly going to grasp CSS and HTML styling in Sigil?

"However, I have never seen a book where the font size
suddenly jumped, where the font face suddenly changed,
where indentations were all over the place or where
paragraph adjustments switched from justified to right ragged
halfway through a page.
Since the dawn of eBooks, however, these things have
become prevalent What's even more worrisome is the fact
that to many authors this seems to be completely acceptable."

[FDPuthuff]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

Can't say I'm very impressed.

Oh look....Drama.


I have only been asking very specific questions, not asking for opinions. Since I was posting in the section for Sigil, it seemed to reason that the choice of using Sigil was to be accepted and a non-issue. I'll be more careful from now on.


Anyway, attached is a cute kitty for your effort.

[exaltedwombat]

'How do I do this in Sigil' is perfectly legitimately answered by 'Well, Sigil' might not be the best tool.'

Next question?

[KevinH]

Or simply use Find & Replace (Sigil has regular expression support) and clips to change to using the proper header tags. Then creating the ToC will be very easy and as an added bonus, reading software will better be able to follow the structure for those with Accessibility concerns. That is why good xhtml tries to identify structure with tags, and reserves css for styles.

Hope something here helps,

KevinH

[KevinH]

BTW, Calibre does have a way to extract info for headings using regular expressions built right into it. I do not like it because it allows ebook devs to not use headings to indicate structure at all (and thus hurts Accessibility) but it could be useful if you do not feel confident enough with Find and Replace using Regular Expressions to add in the actual headings.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by FDPuthuff

Oh look....Drama.


I have only been asking very specific questions, not asking for opinions. Since I was posting in the section for Sigil, it seemed to reason that the choice of using Sigil was to be accepted and a non-issue. I'll be more careful from now on.


Anyway, attached is a cute kitty for your effort.

Oh, yes,you're right. It would be unforgivably presumptuous for people who've done thousands of eBooks to have the ummitigated nerve to comment that something you're doing, or following, might be woefully out of date, or cause you more work than is needed--like incorrectly not using heading classes for your headings.

Bad Wombat! :-)

Hitch

[phillipgessert]

Originally Posted by FDPuthuff

Oh look....Drama.


I have only been asking very specific questions, not asking for opinions. Since I was posting in the section for Sigil, it seemed to reason that the choice of using Sigil was to be accepted and a non-issue. I'll be more careful from now on.


Anyway, attached is a cute kitty for your effort.

Read to me more as a criticism of Guido's book than your choice to use Sigil. It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I think I recall the guide calling for e.g. paragraph classes for headings. That'll cause the TOC issues you're having, on top of just being semantically wrong.

Still going off memory, but I think he recommends that roundtripping thing of copying your entire MSS into a separate text file to rip out all the styling. That's actually sorta disastrous if you DID set up your Word file with proper styles. So, just kinda take guidance from that source with a grain of salt.

Again, acknowledging I may be misremembering, and also it's possible the book has different info compared to the blog guide. I never looked at the book, but I did poke around on the blog some years ago.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by phillipgessert

Read to me more as a criticism of Guido's book than your choice to use Sigil. It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I think I recall the guide calling for e.g. paragraph classes for headings. That'll cause the TOC issues you're having, on top of just being semantically wrong.

Still going off memory, but I think he recommends that roundtripping thing of copying your entire MSS into a separate text file to rip out all the styling. That's actually sorta disastrous if you DID set up your Word file with proper styles. So, just kinda take guidance from that source with a grain of salt.

Again, acknowledging I may be misremembering, and also it's possible the book has different info compared to the blog guide. I never looked at the book, but I did poke around on the blog some years ago.

Philip:

Firstly, it's from 2014 and even if it was brilliant then, we've all moved light years beyond that in the last 6 years. I'm not going to get into whether Guido's Guide was great or not; I do remember, with some...asperity...his blithe assertion that as far back as 2010, you could use ems to size images for Kindle, a claim he made on his website and NEVER backed up when challenged. (And, in case anyone is confused, most certainly did not work then and didn't for years. And is still dicey for images for Kindle today, too, but...)

Given the significant, nay, sea-changes in eBook formatting since 2014, personally, I'd be seeking more up-to-date info, but, hey, that's just me.


Hitch

[JSWolf]

The problem is that a lot of eBooks do not use the best practices. So if you learn from commercial eBooks, you will not learn all the proper ways to do things.

[phillipgessert]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Philip:

Firstly, it's from 2014 and even if it was brilliant then, we've all moved light years beyond that in the last 6 years. I'm not going to get into whether Guido's Guide was great or not; I do remember, with some...asperity...his blithe assertion that as far back as 2010, you could use ems to size images for Kindle, a claim he made on his website and NEVER backed up when challenged. (And, in case anyone is confused, most certainly did not work then and didn't for years. And is still dicey for images for Kindle today, too, but...)

Given the significant, nay, sea-changes in eBook formatting since 2014, personally, I'd be seeking more up-to-date info, but, hey, that's just me.


Hitch

Oh, it was never brilliant, for sure. For example here's what I was talking about above:

Originally Posted by Guido's Blog

There is one HTML tag in particular that I think I should single out at this point, however. I usually stay away from using H1 tags and its brethren H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. They are strange beasts and their behavior can be quite unpredictable, depending on the device or browser you are using. Since we can recreate the behavior of these tags easily through the use of specially styled paragraphs, I usually prefer going that route.

A replacement of the H1 tag, for example, could look like this.

<p class="h1">This is a large headline</p>

By using an appropriate style for the paragraph class we can now give it the size, font and weight we desire.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by phillipgessert

Oh, it was never brilliant, for sure. For example here's what I was talking about above:

LOL, OMG, I'd forgotten that! MWAHAHAHAHAHAH. Priceless.

Yeah. I wonder if he's going to rewrite The Zen...to address accessibility, now?

Hitch

[phillipgessert]

Originally Posted by Hitch

LOL, OMG, I'd forgotten that! MWAHAHAHAHAHAH. Priceless.

Yeah. I wonder if he's going to rewrite The Zen...to address accessibility, now?

Hitch

To that end, I was amused that his example implied that h1=“large”.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by phillipgessert

To that end, I was amused that his example implied that h1=“large”.

Yeah. And that book has been selling well for years.

Hitch

[The_book]

Originally Posted by KevinH

There is a users-guide which is a bit out of date but does cover the basics quite well.
It can be found on our github site here:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil...019.09.03.epub

By the way, I think epub file in Sigil git repo is not a good idea. At least I think it should be in a independent git repo. Small change in epub means to save the file totally to git again.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by The_book

By the way, I think epub file in Sigil git repo is not a good idea. At least I think it should be in a independent git repo. Small change in epub means to save the file totally to git again.

The guide IS in its own independent repository. And yes... that's how version tracking works. Every commit--regardless if it's big or small--needs to be pushed to github if it is to be made available for others to use and/or contribute to.

Whether you think it is good idea or not is irrelevant. That's how just how it is it is. Major props to those who have made an effort to contribute to the guide, but it just doesn't really matter how we ultimately make it available. Easy or hard, people (except the handful I previously praised) won't contribute. They'd much rather complain about it being out of date (or hard to contribute to) than actually knuckling down and helping bring it up to date. *shrug*

But it HAS to be in a git repository. Otherwise we'd have to read the whole guide each and every time someone made a small change just to make sure they didn't inadvertently break something somewhere else. The github repo allows us to see exactly the change that's being proposed (at the code-level) at a glance before signing off on it.

The alternative is to have multiple people making multiple changes to multiple copies of the same epub that we then have to figure out how to integrate without losing anything (and without wasting hours of time that could be better spent actually working on Sigil). No thanks.