Book View: Is it just me or... - Page 5

theducks · 02-13-2020, 05:03 PM

Been using Preview for so long (I tried a BV edit a long time ago and went

).
I never understood the fuss. Preview allows you to sync to the code, where you do the heavy lifting without the mess that BV left

Bigo2 · 02-13-2020, 07:34 PM

So many angry people... Reading your blah, blah, blahs, it seems to me that according to your opinion the original creators of Sigil must have been..., because they put something in the program which sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks all the time... no I don't intend to say anything bad, because they weren't!
I never suggested to use the Book View for serious editing. But some editing was handy:
E.g. Some books have all the text merged in one file. If you clicked on it in the Book Browser, in the Book View you could quickly and easily create files for each chapter just scrolling and putting the cursor on the chapter name and do the Ctrl Enter...
Or in the Book View you could scroll quickly and easily to change the headings...
You could list quickly and easily through the book and view fix little things without worry damaging the code, e.g. occasional space or coma or bold/italic. Nice features.
I know all these things can be done differently but...
I tell you something: Most of us probably use Calibre. As you know it has pretty decent EPUB editor. And also AZW3 editor! It's a serious competition for Sigil. There is no advantage now when in Sigil the Book View is gone...
Why not to use Calibre products for everything?
If you want to compete you don't downgrade your product!

BetterRed · 02-13-2020, 08:04 PM

@Bigo2 - many of the people who use Sigil also use the calibre book-editor, FX: I use its multi-lingual spell checking, I prefer some of its Reports, its Live CSS feature is great for unravelling convoluted CSS.

Do you know why Kovid developed the calibre editor, I can assure you it was not to go into competion with Sigil.

You may have noticed that the calibre editor lacks the equivalent of BookView. Why? Because Kovid knew full well of the problems it created in Sigil.

But hey, you can use calibre-editor's Open With option on xhtml files and the opf file to fire up PageEdit -- just like you can in Sigil. What could be better than that - the same WYSIWG editor in two 'competing' e-book code editors.

BR

DiapDealer · 02-13-2020, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

I tell you something: Most of us probably use Calibre. As you know it has pretty decent EPUB editor. And also AZW3 editor! It's a serious competition for Sigil. There is no advantage now when in Sigil the Book View is gone...

Calibre's a fine piece of software. Use it myself. Kovid's an amazing programmer that I have a ton respect for, and have learned a lot from. Neither I, nor Kevin, nor Sigil are in competition with him or calibre. I am not selling, advertising, promoting, or otherwise encouraging anyone to use Sigil. I don't really care what anybody chooses to use. Sigil is a hobby of mine. Nothing more.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

Why not to use Calibre products for everything?

Why not indeed? You certainly couldn't go wrong if you did. I recommend you do so, in fact.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

If you want to compete you don't downgrade your product!

And therein lies your mistake: I have no desire to "compete." I ultimately don't care what software you, or anyone else, uses to create/edit their epubs.

Use Sigil or don't. I don't care. it won't affect me or my hobby one bit. That's not anger. That's pure, unadulterated indifference to your opinion of our development decisions regarding Book View.

We have a small community of mostly satisfied users of Sigil here at Mobileread. I share my hobby with them and welcome their suggestions, criticisms and general input. Sometimes they influence my decisions; sometimes they don't. But I don't care in the least about Sigil users who don't give back by helping with user support, testing, documentation, code, and bug reports. Family first.

Bigo2 · 02-13-2020, 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Bigo2

Do you know why Kovid developed the calibre editor, I can assure you it was not to go into competion with Sigil.

BR

I don't think Kovid had, but even if it is friendly it still is a competition...
I do think the pride of a developer is to have as many happy customers as possible - not to alienate them be removing a feature from your lovely product they liked. And if it sucks and damages other functions of your product you need to struggle to fix it.

Thank you BetterRed for your suggestions concerning working with those programs.

Tex2002ans · 02-13-2020, 08:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

I never suggested to use the Book View for serious editing. But some editing was handy:

There is PageEdit, which is now the "spiritual successor" to Book View.

Just takes a few extra steps to install it and set it as your External XHTML Editor.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

E.g. Some books have all the text merged in one file. If you clicked on it in the Book Browser, in the Book View you could quickly and easily create files for each chapter just scrolling and putting the cursor on the chapter name and do the Ctrl Enter...
Or in the Book View you could scroll quickly and easily to change the headings...

Agreed, those are all things I enjoy(ed) about Book View.

KevinH did a great job making sure most of Book View's functionality got ported over + in many ways, he made it even better (as BetterRed listed).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

Why not to use Calibre products for everything?

Calibre's Editor is better in some things (Multi-Lingual Spellchecking, checking dead external links), worse in others (TOC generation, Metadata editing, [...]).

I still much prefer using Sigil as my main tool, but I use both when needed.

And like Diap mentioned in other topics:

You could stick with Sigil 0.9.14 if you really can't live without Book View. That was the last version before Book View was removed.

(Personally, I'm sticking to that version too, because I have an enormous months-long ebook I've been working on... but I'll upgrade to Sigil 1.1+... maybe... eventually. Some of those bug-fixes/enhancements/speedups are too juicy to pass up!

)

DNSB · 02-13-2020, 08:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

I don't think Kovid had, but even if it is friendly it still is a competition...
I do think the pride of a developer is to have as many happy customers as possible - not to alienate them be removing a feature from your lovely product they liked. And if it sucks and damages other functions of your product you need to struggle to fix it.

Thank you BetterRed for your suggestions concerning working with those programs.

Perhaps you should read back through some of the discussions as to why BookView could and would munge code even when making what seemed to be trivial changes. As for happy customers? I am happy with Sigil and I approve of the deep-sixing of BookView. I would much rather KevinH and DiapDealer spend their time on improving Sigil and not trying to fix the bugs in QT that caused many of BookView's issues.

Since you referenced calibre, one has to wonder if you have noted the number of issues with calibre 4.x.x due to the bugs in QTWebEngine which replaced QTWebKit? Check the calibre forums. Possibly the one entitled Editor shuts down automatically in the calibre Editor forum might be of interest to you. I did love the quote from Kovid Goyal in the #19 message in that thread.

Oddly, Sigil does have a replacement for BookView which does not have the code damaging issues that BookView did though from your posts, people might think that you had never heard of or checked out PageEdit.

I will admit to getting belly laugh when you stated "I do think the pride of a developer is to have as many happy customers as possible". In my experience in more years in IT that I care to think about, happy customers are very low on most developer's source of pride. Winning the obfuscated C contest? Now that's a source of egoboo.

odamizu · 02-13-2020, 09:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigo2

... And if it sucks and damages other functions of your product you need to struggle to fix it ...

But they did. They removed the sucky, damaging part and replaced it with PageEdit.

They could have removed Book View and provided no WYSIWYG editor alternative at all. But they went to great effort to develop PageEdit as a non-sucky alternative to Book View.

Have you even tried PageEdit? Or Preview?

Quote:

Originally Posted by DNSB

As for happy customers? I am happy with Sigil and I approve of the deep-sixing of BookView.

+1

DiapDealer · 02-13-2020, 09:08 PM

Quote:

Winning the obfuscated C contest? Now that's a source of egoboo.

That close-to-perfect python one-liner that makes you grin every time you look at it.

The all-nighters you pulled because NOT figuring it out wasn't even an option.

Getting it so right that it never occurs to anyone else how ingenious it actually was.

Users?? They don't hold a candle to any of that.

theducks · 02-14-2020, 04:30 AM

Elegant code is the tops.

1 or 2 liners that just blazed.

I remember looking back at some of my Paradox early stuff and going

'I wrote that mess?? Well, at least it worked

BetterRed · 02-14-2020, 05:48 AM

For me, it was never the code - that was the easy bit. It was providing solutions 'they' said couldn't be done. Getting over the political hurdles (supplier and client) was usually harder than getting through the technical hoops.

They said installing a TCP/IP stack on MVS with no SNA tunnelling couldn't be done -- it was done. They said you'll never get RPCs working from Windows/OS2 to CICS -- we did, and it ran for more than 20 years. They said you can't put customer call centres half way round the planet in a 'third world ' country - really!

That was all back in the halcyon days of the '80s and '90s. I'm not convinced the hurdles and hoops would be any easier to navigate today.

BR

DiapDealer · 02-14-2020, 06:18 AM

So, so glad the bulk of my coding efforts have never been done under any traditional boss/employee, client/contractor umbrella. I had a bellyful of that nonsense wearing network admin/sysadmin hats over the years. Bit of scripting here and there, sure. But other than that, my coding has always been all about me. Happy to have never been (and will never be) beholden to customers, bosses, or clients in that regard.

snarkophilus · 02-16-2020, 09:43 PM

Just to join the chorus...

I've been a long time Sigil user (since around 2011 or so), and I also didn't know about Preview until Book View was dropped. I had always edited in Code View and just toggled back and forward to see what the changes looked like Book View.

Hindsight, wish I'd known of Preview earlier. It just never occurred to me to look for something like Preview given Book View was there.

Notjohn · 02-23-2020, 11:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DNSB

As for happy customers? I am happy with Sigil and I approve of the deep-sixing of BookView.

My feelings exactly!

Capricorn · 02-24-2020, 03:08 AM

I discovered Preview, because I read about it on this forum. And I never looked back. Preview simply works. Brilliant.

And I must say I find the complaining about Bookview having been dropped, pretty low-level: Diapdealer and KevinH and all the other contributors spend a lot of their free time to provide us with a superb piece of software, so that us non-techies can edit our books. And hence we can enjoy some good reads, with stylesheets we like..etc. Therefore, if they decide to drop bookview because it is only causing problems, I totally support that. They donate their time, effort and energy, to help us. Hence they decide how the project goes forward. And hence, it behooves us to support them, when they make such a decision, because they clearly consider the effects and even go to extreme lengths to then provide pageedit.
My view is simple: Thank you to all the developers for this nice software, and please ignore all complaints. You decide, noone else.

02-13-2020, 07:34 PM	#62
Bigo2 Zealot Posts: 130 Karma: 48786 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Australia - Adelaide Device: Kindle3	So many angry people... Reading your blah, blah, blahs, it seems to me that according to your opinion the original creators of Sigil must have been..., because they put something in the program which sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks all the time... no I don't intend to say anything bad, because they weren't! I never suggested to use the Book View for serious editing. But some editing was handy: E.g. Some books have all the text merged in one file. If you clicked on it in the Book Browser, in the Book View you could quickly and easily create files for each chapter just scrolling and putting the cursor on the chapter name and do the Ctrl Enter... Or in the Book View you could scroll quickly and easily to change the headings... You could list quickly and easily through the book and view fix little things without worry damaging the code, e.g. occasional space or coma or bold/italic. Nice features. I know all these things can be done differently but... I tell you something: Most of us probably use Calibre. As you know it has pretty decent EPUB editor. And also AZW3 editor! It's a serious competition for Sigil. There is no advantage now when in Sigil the Book View is gone... Why not to use Calibre products for everything? If you want to compete you don't downgrade your product! Last edited by Bigo2; 02-13-2020 at 08:07 PM.

02-13-2020, 08:04 PM	#63
BetterRed null operator (he/him) Posts: 21,611 Karma: 29710338 Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney Australia Device: none	@Bigo2 - many of the people who use Sigil also use the calibre book-editor, FX: I use its multi-lingual spell checking, I prefer some of its Reports, its Live CSS feature is great for unravelling convoluted CSS. Do you know why Kovid developed the calibre editor, I can assure you it was not to go into competion with Sigil. You may have noticed that the calibre editor lacks the equivalent of BookView. Why? Because Kovid knew full well of the problems it created in Sigil. But hey, you can use calibre-editor's Open With option on xhtml files and the opf file to fire up PageEdit -- just like you can in Sigil. What could be better than that - the same WYSIWG editor in two 'competing' e-book code editors. BR Last edited by BetterRed; 02-13-2020 at 08:22 PM.

02-14-2020, 06:18 AM	#72
DiapDealer Grand Sorcerer Posts: 28,341 Karma: 203719646 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD	So, so glad the bulk of my coding efforts have never been done under any traditional boss/employee, client/contractor umbrella. I had a bellyful of that nonsense wearing network admin/sysadmin hats over the years. Bit of scripting here and there, sure. But other than that, my coding has always been all about me. Happy to have never been (and will never be) beholden to customers, bosses, or clients in that regard. Last edited by DiapDealer; 02-14-2020 at 06:26 AM.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Elipsis character displays in code view but not in book view	magmanpi	Sigil	19	03-03-2014 04:45 AM
replace in book view changes view to code view	cybmole	Sigil	4	10-28-2012 01:20 PM
Sigil highlight Book View No Longer Shows in Code View	Themus	Sigil	4	10-04-2012 07:54 PM
quotes differences book view & code view	cybmole	Sigil	13	03-29-2011 01:53 AM
lock book view & code view windows into synch	cybmole	Sigil	5	01-19-2011 10:30 PM

02-13-2020, 05:03 PM	#61
theducks Well trained by Cats Posts: 30,889 Karma: 59840450 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: The Central Coast of California Device: Kobo Libra2,Kobo Aura2v1, K4NT(Fixed: New Bat.), Galaxy Tab A	Been using Preview for so long (I tried a BV edit a long time ago and went ). I never understood the fuss. Preview allows you to sync to the code, where you do the heavy lifting without the mess that BV left

02-14-2020, 04:30 AM	#70
theducks Well trained by Cats Posts: 30,889 Karma: 59840450 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: The Central Coast of California Device: Kobo Libra2,Kobo Aura2v1, K4NT(Fixed: New Bat.), Galaxy Tab A	Elegant code is the tops. 1 or 2 liners that just blazed. I remember looking back at some of my Paradox early stuff and going 'I wrote that mess?? Well, at least it worked

02-14-2020, 05:48 AM	#71
BetterRed null operator (he/him) Posts: 21,611 Karma: 29710338 Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney Australia Device: none	For me, it was never the code - that was the easy bit. It was providing solutions 'they' said couldn't be done. Getting over the political hurdles (supplier and client) was usually harder than getting through the technical hoops. They said installing a TCP/IP stack on MVS with no SNA tunnelling couldn't be done -- it was done. They said you'll never get RPCs working from Windows/OS2 to CICS -- we did, and it ran for more than 20 years. They said you can't put customer call centres half way round the planet in a 'third world ' country - really! That was all back in the halcyon days of the '80s and '90s. I'm not convinced the hurdles and hoops would be any easier to navigate today. BR

02-16-2020, 09:43 PM	#73
snarkophilus Wannabe Connoisseur Posts: 426 Karma: 2516674 Join Date: Apr 2011 Location: Geelong, Australia Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura 2, Sony PRS-T1, Sony PRS-350, Palm TX	Just to join the chorus... I've been a long time Sigil user (since around 2011 or so), and I also didn't know about Preview until Book View was dropped. I had always edited in Code View and just toggled back and forward to see what the changes looked like Book View. Hindsight, wish I'd known of Preview earlier. It just never occurred to me to look for something like Preview given Book View was there.

02-24-2020, 03:08 AM	#75
Capricorn Belgian Pommes Frites Posts: 122 Karma: 35038 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Pocketbook Touch HD	I discovered Preview, because I read about it on this forum. And I never looked back. Preview simply works. Brilliant. And I must say I find the complaining about Bookview having been dropped, pretty low-level: Diapdealer and KevinH and all the other contributors spend a lot of their free time to provide us with a superb piece of software, so that us non-techies can edit our books. And hence we can enjoy some good reads, with stylesheets we like..etc. Therefore, if they decide to drop bookview because it is only causing problems, I totally support that. They donate their time, effort and energy, to help us. Hence they decide how the project goes forward. And hence, it behooves us to support them, when they make such a decision, because they clearly consider the effects and even go to extreme lengths to then provide pageedit. My view is simple: Thank you to all the developers for this nice software, and please ignore all complaints. You decide, noone else.

Advert

Advert