Suggestions for Sigil Improvements or New Features

[BeckyEbook]

In Windows, the OK button is located in the lower right corner, which is somewhat inconsistent with other Sigil windows.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by KevinH

I do not understand what you are trying to say? Yes to see the new top-level Automation menu in this proposed compromise solution you have to enable the Automation Lists in the View->Toolbars menu.

Does not the Toolbars menu at the top of the View's Menu work properly currently in Sigil?

Works fine - this is what mine looks like

Originally Posted by KevinH

Overall, are you for or against or neutral on the addition of a top level Automation menu?

I posted my preference on the first page of this thread==>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...4&postcount=14

Originally Posted by KevinH

Does this compromise work for you?

The option in Preferences will work for me.

OT: where do things stand with launching the upcoming version of Sigil via calibre's Open with… the one in the baseline product, not the plugin.

I believe Kovid made some changes, which should be in pre-release 8.12.100 - has anyone tested it with the Sigil beta… BeckyEbook

BR

[BeckyEbook]

@BetterRed: I confirm that Calibre 8.12.100 works with "Open with..." with Sigil built by me with Qt 6.9.3.
Works with official master branch and Kevin's fork master branch.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by KevinH

@BeckyEbook what did you mean about adding a space above the Okay button in the ManageAutomationDialog? Please see my screenshot below. There appears to be a reasonable distance to the Okay button (at least on a Mac).

On Windows 11, the OK box is in the bottom corner touching the lines.

[DiapDealer]

My rebuild of Qt6.9.3 should have eliminated the calibre Open With issue. Kovid's work may have made my fix unnecessary, but still...

By the way: I'd appreciate it if those who build their own Sigil on Windows could verify that they're able to successfully launch Sigil by right-clicking on an epub and selecting Open With->Sigil from the context menu.

Until this commit last night (https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil...a54bf57f31af17) Sigil was silently crashing for me on Windows 10/11 when trying it. The Event Viewer would show a crash related to Qt6WebEngineCore.dll. This was only when building Sigil with Qt6.9+. It worked fine with Qt6.8.2

After the commit, I've had success launching Sigil in every way I can think of: shortcut; double-clicking an epub; right-clicking an epub and selecting Open With->Sigil from the context menu; dragging an epub and dropping it on the Sigil shortcut; from the command line (with and without an epub as a parameter).

Sorry to potentially derail the thread.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BeckyEbook

@BetterRed: I confirm that Calibre 8.12.100 works with "Open with..." with Sigil built by me with Qt 6.9.3.
Works with official master branch and Kevin's fork master branch.

Thanks - apart from anything else I use it several times a day to remove non-essential metadata elements from propaganda… media releases

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

By the way: I'd appreciate it if those who build their own Sigil on Windows could verify that they're able to successfully launch Sigil by right-clicking on an epub and selecting Open With->Sigil from the context menu.

Both the artifact version downloaded from GitHub and the version I compiled here from Kevin's repository with the QT6 changes work here with calibre 8.12.100 using either the Open With plugin or context menu Open With.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Sorry to potentially derail the thread.

Bad DiapDealer! Please sit in the corner for 15 minutes!

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Both the artifact version downloaded from GitHub and the version I compiled here from Kevin's repository with the QT6 changes work here with calibre 8.12.100 using either the Open With plugin or context menu Open With.

Interesting. I would expect Sigil compiled from Kevin's repository (with any version of Qt.9+) to fail the Windows Explorer context menu Open With test. His fork hasn't pulled in my fix yet.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Interesting. I would expect Sigil compiled from Kevin's repository (with any version of Qt.9+) to fail the Windows Explorer context menu Open With test. His fork hasn't pulled in my fix yet.

2 of the 3 commits Kevin's repository showed as being behind were already in Kevin's repository and I added your commit just to satisfy my OCD tendencies. That was why I mentioned "Kevin's repository with the QT6 changes".

[DiapDealer]

Gotcha. Thanks for checking.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by DNSB

On Windows 11, the OK box is in the bottom corner touching the lines.

@DNSB and @BeckyEbook

Thanks for explaining. I think that is a minor change to remove the margins in the ManageAutomation Dialog form ui file. It uses margins that were left over from Sigil Preferences that imbed themselves in a larger QDialog frame.

I will try tweaking those values tomorrow.

Thanks,

[philja]

Originally Posted by DNSB

On Windows 11, the OK box is in the bottom corner touching the lines.

Same in my MacBook. Works fine, but would be aesthetically more pleasing if it were moved a tad to the left to be in vertical alignment with the New List and Remove buttons.

The sort of job you do when there's nothing better to do.

I too am happy with the idea of putting the Automation in the Preferences settings.

[KevinH]

That "okay" button will always be in the right corner on macOS (it is the spec) so changing the dialog width will always change it. So it can't be aligned it with any buttons as those change positions as well. I will improve the margins around it though.

[KevinH]

Okay, I removed the margin limitations in ManageAutomation.ui so that the "okay" button is better placed.

Then I pushed all of the automation menu changes to normal Sigil master. This new feature will appear in the next release of Sigil.

Over the next couple of days I will be uploading beta builds from our CI builds so that all interested parties can test with it.

These changes are going to need a lot of testing to make sure they do not break anything for anyone else.

For those who build from source you can pull and build from normal Sigil master.

[KevinH]

Because the list of Langauges is so very very long, I think Doitsu's idea might be useful to people who use Sigil a lot with a specific set of language codes.

So I found a place in Language.cpp to easily restrict language codes used in Sigil by an environment variable.

The new environment variable is:

QString codes = Utility::GetEnvironmentVar("SIGIL_ONLY_USE_LANGCODES");

Its value is a valid list of iso 639 lanugage codes separated by commas "," with *no* extra spaces allowed.

Note: this is generally not a "feature" that we are going to publicize but perhaps you can convince BeckyEbook to add this env variable to her nice plugin.

For example, the way to limit to these language codes would be:

export SIGIL_ONLY_USE_LANGCODES=en,fr,de,es,it,ja,en-US,en-GB

I have pushed this to Sigil master.

Please give this a try if you build your own.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Remember h* selections

Allow advanced users to customize the book language dropdown list

Most book producers probably only use the usual EFIGS languages and their local language, but the language list is very long and contains several languages that are highly unlikely to be ever used in an epub. For example, Middle High German.

I realize that creating another settings dialog would be a lot of work, but you could have Sigil check for a lang_codes ini entry that advanced users would have to manually add.
For example:

lang_codes = en-US, fr-FR, it-IT, de-DE, es-ES

Sigil would then only display the languages defined via lang_codes, provided that all language codes are valid.

Alternatively, you could reorder the language list to prioritize languages the app is fully translated for.

Chinese (China) (zh-CN)
French (fr)
German (de)
Korean (ko)
Polish (pl)
Portuguese (Brazil) (pt-BR)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Spanish (es)
Ukrainian (Ukraine) (uk-UA)