Spell checker

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by theducks

File "New"
works

Yes, Ducky, I know it works. Just feels hinky, what can I tell ya?

Hitch

[pietvo]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Sigil (like Word) uses the Single Document Interface system, and thus doesn't have "Close File". That's something for Multiple Document Interface applications.

I prefer SDI for applications like Sigil. Using MDI for a word processor would violate the Law of Least Astonishment, since Word, OpenOffice Writer, AbiWord etc. are all SDI.

On Mac OS X it does have a Close menu item in the File menu. And it is mapped to Cmd-W. This is normal on Mac OS X.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Vintage Season

In fact, renaming that function to "New/Close" would be a simple change, and since it effectively serves the same purpose, doing so might eliminate further confusion on this front.

"New/Close"? Sorry, but not. As a new user, the first thing that would pop into my mind when seeing that would be "WTF is this?".

Originally Posted by pietvo

On Mac OS X it does have a Close menu item in the File menu. And it is mapped to Cmd-W. This is normal on Mac OS X.

I knew someone would bring this up... Mac OS is a special beast. On Windows/Linux, it's customary to start the same application several times with different data. On Mac, not so much. A GUI app is expected to provide several top-level windows for editing multiple documents. So Sigil does that too. I deeply dislike it, but true SDI is not something Mac users are accustomed too. Without it, it was impossible to edit multiple epub documents at the same time on Macs.

Implementing that also meant remapping "Exit" to "Close", and using the appropriate shortcut.

On Windows/Linux, you just start several instances of Sigil. This is the preferred and HIG-compliant way of doing "multiple main windows" on those platforms.

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by Valloric

On Windows/Linux, it's customary to start the same application several times with different data. On Mac, not so much. A GUI app is expected to provide several top-level windows for editing multiple documents. So Sigil does that too. I deeply dislike it, but true SDI is not something Mac users are accustomed too. Without it, it was impossible to edit multiple epub documents at the same time on Macs.

Implementing that also meant remapping "Exit" to "Close", and using the appropriate shortcut.

On Windows/Linux, you just start several instances of Sigil. This is the preferred and HIG-compliant way of doing "multiple main windows" on those platforms.

Valloric, I may not have been clear in my earlier suggestion.

Going back to the example you used, of office suites with which almost everyone is familiar—and which have universally interchangeable shortcuts that quite a few people use as second nature!—here are the menu options and shortcuts to which I am accustomed in OpenOffice Writer, on a Windows machine (see screenshot attachment).

That said, Sigil is your program... and an excellent tool. If you choose to implement a few additional shortcuts and menu items, a lot of us will be happy. If you don't, none of us will suffer.



- M.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Vintage Season

Valloric, I may not have been clear in my earlier suggestion.

Going back to the example you used, of office suites with which almost everyone is familiar—and which have universally interchangeable shortcuts that quite a few people use as second nature!—here are the menu options and shortcuts to which I am accustomed in OpenOffice Writer, on a Windows machine (see screenshot attachment).

That said, Sigil is your program... and an excellent tool. If you choose to implement a few additional shortcuts and menu items, a lot of us will be happy. If you don't, none of us will suffer.

Yes, I see what you mean. Word and Writer behave in the Mac style, "emulated MDI" system on all platforms. Even when the user opens several documents, he actually has several SDI main windows, but there's only one instance (process) of Word or Writer running.

This has both advantages and disadvantages. I'm pretty sure that the primary reason why they are choosing this route is to conserve RAM. Since Word 2010 will takes up ~80MB on my machine with both one and five (empty) documents open, the advantage is clear. Having several smaller documents open amortizes the "upfront" memory cost.

The disadvantage is that if one of those documents does something that makes the process hang, all the documents go down with it. This is not a problem for Word and Writer which are large, stable applications with teams of people working on them. Their general application stability is usually more than respectable.

Sadly, Sigil is not there yet, as any regular user will tell you . It can crash or hang (although now much less frequently than it used to). The benefit of preserving the other documents when one goes down is substantial.

Also, the memory advantage of the single process approach is minimal with Sigil. On my main machine, Sigil eats 15MB at idle. Opening more tabs adds more memory, but the "static" amount is still just 15MB.

Thus, it is more beneficial to preserve the current single process system than to adopt the Word/Writer one.

As such, a "Close" command does not make sense. Word/Writer use it to differentiate between closing the current document, and closing the application (which is "Exit") and all documents with it. In Sigil, you can only close the the current document, and this is called "Exit" since it also exits the application.

[All of this relates only to Windows/Linux. As I've explained, Sigil behaves differently on Macs because it has no choice. I'd use the Win/Lin approach there too if I could.]

[pietvo]

There is one difference between Sigil and `normal' Mac applications. Sigil exits when the last document is closed. This is not done by other applications. They keep running so that you can open another document by File->Open or File->New. With Sigil you must open Sigil again and when you open with File->Open you have this additional empty document hanging around. Or you must go to the Finder and double click on your ePub document, but this won't work if ePub is defined to open with ADE. So this is annoying to Mac users as this is not the way other word processors work.

[KevinH]

Hi,

FWIW: For spellchecking and creating epubs my work flow now uses OpenOffice.org - Writer which runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Sun, Free BSD, etc and is completely free. It is a full word processor similar to Microsoft Word in functionality and it can read in and write out Microsoft Office file formats.

You can load dictionaries for a large variety of languages and you can tell it which parts of your text are written in a particular language. It can spell check in many languages at once.

Once I have completed the spellcheck, I then use "writer2xhtml.oxt" which is a free extension for OpenOffice.org Writer (again that runs on all platforms) that will export my document to xhtml.

You can then load the xhtml directly into Sigil and then touch things up, add fonts, chapter breaks, etc, and then have it produce the final epub.

I then check things using epubcheck 1.05 and fix as needed.

This seems to work quite well for *.doc documents and long xhtml documents that have been created from OCR (think Topaz Books converted to xhtml) that have lots of spelling errors from imperfect OCR.

Hope something here helps,

KevinH

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by pietvo

There is one difference between Sigil and `normal' Mac applications. Sigil exits when the last document is closed. This is not done by other applications.

Oh don't get me wrong, Sigil is currently way off from Mac HIG compliance. Mostly because I don't have a Mac so I can hardly test and develop for it. I have Snow Leopard running on VMware, but it's basically unusable. I just SSH into it (well, a script I wrote does) to compile the Mac builds there and that's it.

Until this situation changes (or a Mac developer decides to step in and help with Mac related issues), Mac support will stay at this less-than-perfect state.

Originally Posted by KevinH

I then check things using epubcheck 1.05 and fix as needed.

If Sigil produces an epub that's not epubcheck compliant and this is not caused by problems in the input mark-up, please report it on the tracker. These are high priority bugs for me.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Hi,

FWIW: For spellchecking and creating epubs my work flow now uses OpenOffice.org - Writer which runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Sun, Free BSD, etc and is completely free. It is a full word processor similar to Microsoft Word in functionality and it can read in and write out Microsoft Office file formats.

Really? Because I tried using OO in lieu of Word, when I was struggling with having to strip out the nine bazillion "spans" getting stuck in by OCR for text formatting, and after figuring out that OO couldn't even do something as simple as S&R the section breaks put in by the OCR conversion to a .doc format, I gave it up as a waste of time. I found the regex end of it extremely difficult to use, much harder than it needs to be, IMHO.

You can load dictionaries for a large variety of languages and you can tell it which parts of your text are written in a particular language. It can spell check in many languages at once.

Well, I can see how that would be handy.

Once I have completed the spellcheck, I then use "writer2xhtml.oxt" which is a free extension for OpenOffice.org Writer (again that runs on all platforms) that will export my document to xhtml.

You can then load the xhtml directly into Sigil and then touch things up, add fonts, chapter breaks, etc, and then have it produce the final epub.

I then check things using epubcheck 1.05 and fix as needed.

This seems to work quite well for *.doc documents and long xhtml documents that have been created from OCR (think Topaz Books converted to xhtml) that have lots of spelling errors from imperfect OCR.

Hope something here helps,

KevinH

You said, about 3 paras ago, "add fonts?" So you're basically exporting a completely stripped xhtml file w/o any css and then creating the css from scratch--do I understand you correctly? I'm curious, as I do a lot of ebook creation from OCR'd OOP books.

Hitch

[KevinH]

Hi,

I have never had problems with search and replace in OpenOffice.org but when I need to work with lots of bad html, I simply use Tidy to clean it up first or a text-editor (like emacs) to clean things up.

As for CSS, yes CSS does exist and works fine. I was referring to adding the fonts to the opf files not the xhtml files. Sigil handles all of that quite easily.

Hope this is clearer.

KevinH

[JvdW]

Originally Posted by crutledge

Are there any plans to include a spell checker? I've just run across a few files that could surely use one.

Just for those that can't wait, see:
http://www.microspell.com

I have tested it in CodeView, doesn't work in BookView, and its amazing. It knows that it shouldn't complain about the html/xml tags and will show you only the errors in the text.
Further its quite feature rich, can be enhenced with all kind of language dictionaries (a/ispell dicts), special case ones, etc.

Regards,

Joop

[canadianfolk]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Sigil (like Word) uses the Single Document Interface system, and thus doesn't have "Close File". That's something for Multiple Document Interface applications.

I prefer SDI for applications like Sigil. Using MDI for a word processor would violate the Law of Least Astonishment, since Word, OpenOffice Writer, AbiWord etc. are all SDI.

I'm not very tech savvy, and was looking for the 'close' button, which is illustrated in the online FAQ and manual. I've spent the last few hours digging around the files and internet, unable to find anything that specifically pointed to the 'close' menu, and worrying that there was something wrong with my installation.

So I was very glad to find this forum, after digging through hundreds of Sigil posts, after being very glad to find Sigil. So far so good, and I'll just get over myself about the lack of 'close' on my File menu. Program works great otherwise!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by canadianfolk

I'm not very tech savvy, and was looking for the 'close' button, which is illustrated in the online FAQ and manual. I've spent the last few hours digging around the files and internet, unable to find anything that specifically pointed to the 'close' menu, and worrying that there was something wrong with my installation.

So I was very glad to find this forum, after digging through hundreds of Sigil posts, after being very glad to find Sigil. So far so good, and I'll just get over myself about the lack of 'close' on my File menu. Program works great otherwise!

Welcome

Play with Linux for a while and you will get used to Not having a Close or "Apply" button (Apply does appear, but sparingly)

[Pagali]

Originally Posted by JvdW

Just for those that can't wait, see:
http://www.microspell.com

I have tested it in CodeView, doesn't work in BookView, and its amazing. It knows that it shouldn't complain about the html/xml tags and will show you only the errors in the text.
Further its quite feature rich, can be enhenced with all kind of language dictionaries (a/ispell dicts), special case ones, etc.

Regards,

Joop

Thanks so much for this tip! I tried all 3 of the Spell Checkers linked in this thread, and this is the only one that actually works for me from within Sigil, and works well!

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Pagali

Thanks so much for this tip! I tried all 3 of the Spell Checkers linked in this thread, and this is the only one that actually works for me from within Sigil, and works well!

well when I test it in code view, it destroys all the HTML tags!

I am using win 7 64 bit , latest sigil + downloaded spell checker today.

i.e. I open an epub in sigil ,go to code view, hit CTRL+f12 to bring up spell check window. seems to work, but when I tell it to return text to sigil - that is when it wipes out all HTML

it "seems" to work better in book view . if I check + replace book view text then switch to code view - the HTML seems undamaged, (1st test - in my 2nd test in another book - all text became blue+ underlined! ) I'm reluctant to use it "for real" until I know more about how it works.

am I supposed to use it a a spell checker but still correct the detected errors manually within the sigil window ?

I'd also like to know - can it be configured to NOT spell check any capitalised words - that would bake it superior to MS word . most novels have lots of capitalised proper names & t'would be better if they could all be ignored by default.