Sigil, the ePub editor

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Are you planning to add support for Mobipocket OPF files?

Mobipocket support is a bit down the line. Sigil needs to be a competent ePub editor before it tries being a multi-format editor.

Originally Posted by Kirtai

Looks really nice. I'm curious though, do you think it'll ever support DAISY format ePubs?

You mean DTBook? Definitely not anytime soon, if ever.

Originally Posted by darkmonk

There were however some further features that would add much functionality.
Spell check - every author needs this, if they are using only sigil to make their books.
Tables - now I think this is important. I often have tables in my documents, and it would be good to keep having them.

So those are the two big things I think could be added.

Add enhancement requests for these on the tracker.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Ah, i re-edited that file as i needed it to work.
I'll try to reproduce it.

Please do.

Originally Posted by FrancisT

Running on Xubuntu 9.0.4 with Qt 4.5 (allegedly but not explicitly installed) and with no Calibre I get the followiing error:

error while loading shared libraries: libQtWebKit.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

On my other Xubuntu 9.04 mchine - with calibre 0.6x installed - I do not get this error. I assume there is a library downloded somewhere that is not in the default Xubuntu setup. I'm sure i can figure out what the difference is but I figure this might be of interest to others

Please install Qt explicitly . I believe calibre will install Qt for you if you don't already have it.

Originally Posted by Jellby

I opened an ePUB with Sigil and it looks like it makes it a single long text flow. Adding a view for separate files would be
fine.

The flow is separated by "chapter breaks" (they look like red double lines). These mark where the flow will be split into multiple XHTML documents. If you load in an ePub comprised of several XHTML files, they will be respected: chapter breaks will be inserted where one file stopped and the other began. So you don't loose anything. You just gain the ability to edit everything all at once.

Originally Posted by Jellby

A CSS editor would be welcome too.

You can edit the CSS code in the Code View. Every style tag will be exported as a separate CSS file, and every separate CSS file loaded gets loaded as a style tag.

Originally Posted by Jellby

And validators.

I can't just use XHTML and CSS validators since the epub spec is a bit different from the vanilla versions. I plan on writing an epub checking library (kinda like epub-check, only in C++... and hopefully better). This is a very large sub-project so you won't see anything soon.

Originally Posted by Jellby

It looks like the TOC editor is dependent on HTML tags, that's fine for a start, but it should allow more flexibility, like adding arbitrary TOC entries and directly editing the TOC tree (the depth of each entry).

This will be possible with time. The TOC editor you have almost wasn't included in the 0.1.0 release.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Is there a way to add linear="no" to spine items?

Not yet.

Originally Posted by Jellby

In the metadata editor, it should be possible to specify whether Author, Illustrator, etc. are "creator" or "contributor", and the file-as property.

Currently the author is listed as the creator and everybody else as a contributor.

The file-as attribute is already supported. If you type in a name with a comma ("Doe, John") that name will be directly written to the file-as attribute and the inverted form ("John Doe") will be written as the value. This works with imported books, too (the file-as attribute is copied to the Meta Editor).

Originally Posted by Jellby

I see it includes date of creation, date of modification, etc. probably other user-configurable events would be useful too

When someone thinks of a few other users would enjoy too, I'll add them. But the other events could be added on a per-user basis from an options screen. Make an issue for this.

Originally Posted by Jellby

(and set date of modification automatically upon saving the file?)

I don't want to set anything automatically for the user. Although this could be user-selectable in an options screen. Make an issue for this.

[AprilHare]

You'll have to forgive me if this has already been answered, but I have issues running this alpha of Sigil:
Running on Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 - got libqt4-webkit 4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1 installed.
Getting error message when I run Sigil:

./Sigil: error while loading shared libraries: libQtWebKit.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by AprilHare

You'll have to forgive me if this has already been answered, but I have issues running this alpha of Sigil:
Running on Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 - got libqt4-webkit 4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1 installed.
Getting error message when I run Sigil:

I can't tell you anything more than what the error report tells you: you don't have the QtWebkit lib on your system. It's a standard component of Qt 4.5.0 on all platforms on Mac and Windows, but not on Linux. I'm running Jaunty same as you, and I have the lib.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Mobipocket support is a bit down the line. Sigil needs to be a competent ePub editor before it tries being a multi-format editor.

I wasn't asking for support for the format; just support for the one file.

In the process of making an ebook, MobiCreator makes and sets aside the OPF file. It is left in the same folder as the html & image source files. TBH, you're already supporting OPF files. They're inside every Epub.

P.S. The other reason I'm asking for this is I want to make an OPF file generator.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I wasn't asking for support for the format; just support for the one file.

In the process of making an ebook, MobiCreator makes and sets aside the OPF file. It is left in the same folder as the html & image source files. TBH, you're already supporting OPF files. They're inside every Epub.

P.S. The other reason I'm asking for this is I want to make an OPF file generator.

So what exactly are you asking for then? I've never used MobiCreator or Mobipocket format ebooks. If I'm understanding you correctly, MobiCreator creates a folder with content files and an OPF file. Well then if you want to load this folder into Sigil, just add a META-INF folder with the container.xml file pointing to the OPF file, zip it, change the extension to epub and open it with Sigil.

You'll have to give me some more information.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Valloric

The flow is separated by "chapter breaks" (they look like red double lines). These mark where the flow will be split into multiple XHTML documents. If you load in an ePub comprised of several XHTML files, they will be respected: chapter breaks will be inserted where one file stopped and the other began. So you don't loose anything. You just gain the ability to edit everything all at once.

I noticed that, but it may also be interesting to see only one file, and not the whole flow at once.

You can edit the CSS code in the Code View. Every style tag will be exported as a separate CSS file, and every separate CSS file loaded gets loaded as a style tag.

Well, I meant the ability to separately edit the CSS files, and decide what styles go in each file, etc.

I can't just use XHTML and CSS validators since the epub spec is a bit different from the vanilla versions. I plan on writing an epub checking library (kinda like epub-check, only in C++... and hopefully better). This is a very large sub-project so you won't see anything soon.

Can't XHTML and CSS validators be modified? Even if the specs are different, being able to use the standard validators would probably be useful. And in the meantime just using epub-chek would be of help.

The file-as attribute is already supported.

But it's not separately editable. For instance, I like to have "P. G. Wodehouse" as author and "Wodehouse, Pelham Grenvile" as file-as.

When someone thinks of a few other users would enjoy too, I'll add them.

I was thinking of adding a generic "date" and make the "event" property editable.

I don't want to set anything automatically for the user. Although this could be user-selectable in an options screen.

Of course, I meant it would be optionally automatic

By the way. In dates it is possible to store only year or year and month information (not day), but it seems Sigil defaults to 01 when day or month are missing (i.e, "1950" is displayed as "01-01-1950"). I think that should be fixed (I know, I'll add an issue )

[tibiafry]

Originally Posted by Valloric

So what exactly are you asking for then? I've never used MobiCreator or Mobipocket format ebooks. If I'm understanding you correctly, MobiCreator creates a folder with content files and an OPF file. Well then if you want to load this folder into Sigil, just add a META-INF folder with the container.xml file pointing to the OPF file, zip it, change the extension to epub and open it with Sigil.

You'll have to give me some more information.

I don't know if this would help but:

http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/
Mobigen 6.2 build 43 (current version. On the future, whatever).

You can download that mobigen command line app and have a look. It can easilly transform an OPF + (content files: xhtml, css, images...) into a mobipocket. You would do that by unzipping the OEBPS folder in the epub file, and then process the files with mobigen. It's not very hard to implement, i think altough it would only work in windows.

BTW great job with the Chapter splitting thing. Now I'm going to use Sigil for splitting chapters of InDesign generated ePubs. Next step would be a feature to add chapters into the TOC? Cause I can't seem to see how could I do that with an InDesign generated file.

Congratulations on your great work!

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Well, I meant the ability to separately edit the CSS files, and decide what styles go in each file, etc.

if i understand correctly, in fact you can do that ; just create a new CSS style tag in the code like this :

<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/

.some_css {
styles_defined_in : first_css_file;}

/*]]>*/
  </style>

<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/

.more_css {
styles_defined_in : second_css_file;}

/*]]>*/
  </style>

for each style tag, a separate css file is created. if you import an epub with several css files, each one is delimited by its own style tag. unless i misunderstand what you are asking ? (or what sigil is doing...)

Of course, I meant it would be optionally automatic

I think that should be fixed (I know, I'll add an issue )

[FrancisT]

Originally Posted by AprilHare

You'll have to forgive me if this has already been answered, but I have issues running this alpha of Sigil:
Running on Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 - got libqt4-webkit 4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1 installed.
Getting error message when I run Sigil:

on a clean(ish) *buntu 9.04 you need to add (using synaptic or apt-get) support for libqt4-svg and libqt4-webkit which are not included by default (and their various dependencies). It looks like calibre makes you get these (at least the source code version does) but if you have an otherwise clean system you don't get them.

Maybe this could be added to the sigil home page or to the announcement at the top of this thread?

Francis

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I noticed that, but it may also be interesting to see only one file, and not the whole flow at once.

Currently this is the way Sigil works. Adding the ability to separately view and edit each XHTML file would require massive re-engineering of the importers, exporters and the entire GUI which is currently geared towards single-flow editing. I'm not ready to do that yet. Not any time soon. Maybe in Sigil 2.0.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Well, I meant the ability to separately edit the CSS files, and decide what styles go in each file, etc.

Since separate CSS files are loaded as separate style tags, and separate style tags get exported as separate CSS files, I don't see why you can't decide which styles go into which file right now.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Can't XHTML and CSS validators be modified? Even if the specs are different, being able to use the standard validators would probably be useful. And in the meantime just using epub-chek would be of help.

Would be lovely, wouldn't it? Especially embedding epub-check. But they are all written in Java. Sigil is in C++. I have no intention of requiring the Java runtime for Sigil. And no, GCJ is not an option.

Originally Posted by Jellby

But it's not separately editable. For instance, I like to have "P. G. Wodehouse" as author and "Wodehouse, Pelham Grenvile" as file-as.

Yes, I agree, it's somewhat limited right now. You can't have everything in a 0.1.0 release, now can you?

Originally Posted by Jellby

I was thinking of adding a generic "date" and make the "event" property editable.

I was thinking of users being able to add their own date elements. That is, I go to an options screen, click on something like "Add new date event", and then type in "Reprint" or whatever. A list of these custom date elements would be in a list near that button. I would then go to the Meta Editor and the new date type would be selectable in the "Add Basic" dialog. Of course, in the background this would merely change the event attribute on the date element created.

You have to think of options in the form of "How am I going to present this to the user in a simple and usable way?". This is absolutely crucial, which unfortunately many OSS developers don't understand.

The average user doesn't give a rat's ass about "date" elements and "event" attributes. He doesn't want to learn what those are, and he shouldn't have to. He is adding metadata. It is all being worked out for him in the background.

This is also why books are loaded as a single flow and not a separate file. The user doesn't care that it's all actually a bunch of files, he wants to edit the book. He's used Word. He's used Open Office. He's used Book Designer. It's always a single flow because in his mind he's editing one book, the epub file.

Yes, the power users are going to lose some of their flexibility. I'll do everything in my power to help these 5% of users if it doesn't negatively impact the user experience of the other 95%.

You sound like you want to edit all of the XHTML, CSS, XPGT files etc. as separate files in an editor that would in the end just wrap everything up into an epub. That's great. But that's not what Sigil is. Not right now anyway. If something like this is added, it would be accessible by explicitly switching to the "advanced" GUI. I have no immediate plans for making this happen, although I would like to add it somewhere down the line. But not any time soon. There are more important issues to attend to, and they impact the other 95%, if not everyone.

Originally Posted by Jellby

By the way. In dates it is possible to store only year or year and month information (not day), but it seems Sigil defaults to 01 when day or month are missing (i.e, "1950" is displayed as "01-01-1950"). I think that should be fixed (I know, I'll add an issue )

This is also a GUI issue first, and an implementation issue second. The QDate object used to store dates demands months and days specified. Using this native Qt object provides us with an effortless way to edit them in a GUI: just shove the QDate into a TableView (like in Meta Editor) and the user is limited to entering only valid days, years and months. Each field in the date can be edited separately, and the object restrains the user to only valid values. Adding support for inserting only some parts of a date would mean ditching the native QDate objects and forcing users to type everything in as a text string.

Validating their input would be difficult at best. What format should they use? MM-DD-YYYY? DD-MM-YYYY? Dot's instead of dashes? What happens when the user types in "blabla"?

Americans want to use their weird middle-endian date format and I don't want to force them or the rest of the world to one version. QDate automatically changes it's display according to the locale.

My point with this is that enabling partial insertion of dates is more difficult than it seems and will have to wait until other issues are sorted out first. For now just use 1.1.YYYY. if you don't know the month or day.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by FrancisT

Maybe this could be added to the sigil home page or to the announcement at the top of this thread?

Done for the thread. I don't want to add installation instructions to the homepage, but I will create a README file (which should have been there in the first place... it was 4 AM, have mercy ) and add it to the builds in 0.1.1.

Thanks for this BTW.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Valloric

So what exactly are you asking for then? I've never used MobiCreator or Mobipocket format ebooks. If I'm understanding you correctly, MobiCreator creates a folder with content files and an OPF file. Well then if you want to load this folder into Sigil, just add a META-INF folder with the container.xml file pointing to the OPF file, zip it, change the extension to epub and open it with Sigil.

You'll have to give me some more information.

I'd like to be able to open it in Sigil without the intermediate steps (zip, rename, etc).

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I'd like to be able to open it in Sigil without the intermediate steps (zip, rename, etc).

Create an issue and I'll see what I can do.

[Valloric]

Request for documentation writers can be found here.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Request for documentation writers can be found here.

great idea. you should add that link to the 1st post as well.