Looking for Volunteers for New Chapters for Sigil User's Guide

[KevinH]

Yes there are many external links that need to be udpated.

Thanks for letting me know.

Edit:

I fixed those links in my local repo copy and will push it after the next major set of changes.

Originally Posted by Banjo

There are two links in the file "manage_plugins.html" that result in 404 errors when I click on them. The two files, testplugin_v013.zip and Sigil_Plugin_Framework_rev8.epub apparently are no longer available in the repo :

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/tree/master/docs.

We might want to update those links while we are fixing things.

[KevinH]

Okay, I just tried once again to merge in all of the modified image files into the sigil-user-guide repo. I tracked down most of the duplication and the image file name mismatches and have just a handful of unused files left to track down and fix.

I have updated the latest version on the first post of this thread with the latest version of src_updated.epub (which should now match the repo).

I still really would like to get at least 2 volunteers to create these 2 new chapters at a minimum:


1. A tutorial on using CheckPoints to save create a checkpoint to save its current state, compare the current epub to a previously made checkpoint, doing a restore from a previous checkpoint, and use manage checkpoint repos to delete no longer needed repositories.

2. A tutorial on using Preview's Inspector to see the exact css that impacts a particular element and some of the other Advanced Features of the Inspector (javscript console, memory usage, etc.) Perhaps a link to external documentation on Chrome's Developer Tools / Inspector.


If anyone wants to volunteer for any of those, I would greatly appreciate it as my writing is too verbose and I skip over too many details that appear to be too obvious to me but obviously not to others.

[Banjo]

I still really would like to get at least 2 volunteers to create these 2 new chapters at a minimum:


1. A tutorial on using CheckPoints to save create a checkpoint to save its current state, compare the current epub to a previously made checkpoint, doing a restore from a previous checkpoint, and use manage checkpoint repos to delete no longer needed repositories.

2. A tutorial on using Preview's Inspector to see the exact css that impacts a particular element and some of the other Advanced Features of the Inspector (javscript console, memory usage, etc.) Perhaps a link to external documentation on Chrome's Developer Tools / Inspector.

I would happily volunteer for one of those, but I know nothing about either of those tools, so it would involve me taking some time to learn how they work. I will go study the Inspector to see if I can learn enough about it to write a reasonable description of it.

Stay tuned.

[KevinH]

Great! Thank you! I created a rough first draft of the CheckPoint tutorial myself.

I will push it to the user-guide repo and update the epub attachment in the first post.

Edit: Pushed to the user guide repo and src_updated.epub has just now been updated a second time today.

This epub is starting to get big (13 meg) because of all the photos. I think we will want to try to reduce sizes and depths if need be to get this back to a more reasonable size.

Thanks to all!

[odamizu]

I am almost finished updating the User Interface chapter.

Question: What is "Format > Remove Tag Pair" supposed to do? How does it work? This is also the toolbar button that looks like <x>

For the life of me, I can't get it to do anything! So I'm not sure what explanation to provide.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by odamizu

I am almost finished updating the User Interface chapter.

Question: What is "Format > Remove Tag Pair" supposed to do? How does it work? This is also the toolbar button that looks like <x>

For the life of me, I can't get it to do anything! So I'm not sure what explanation to provide.

I think if you have something like:

<p>This is a <span class="useless"><b>bold</b></span> example.</p>

and you are in the <span>, Remove Tag Pair will remove the matching <span> + </span>.

1. Click inside the opening <span> here (marked with |):

<p>This is a <span| class="useless"><b>bold</b></span> example.</p>

2. Press Format > Remove Tag Pair, and you'll get:

<p>This is a <b>bold</b> example.</p>

Very helpful when trying to clean up bad code.

I assume the opposite works too:

1. Click inside the closing </span>:

<p>This is a <span class="useless"><b>bold</b></span|> example.</p>

2. Press Remove Tag Pair:

<p>This is a <b>bold</b> example.</p>

[KevinH]

Yes, if you click the cursor in an open or close tag with nothing else highlighted, you should be able to use Remove Tag Pair to remove that tag and its matching counterpart.

There have been a few bug fixes since your macOS version of 1.5.0 related to moving into the tag using arrow keys not working but your version does not have those fixes (yet).

[odamizu]

Oh dear lord I kept selecting text expecting the button to remove the tag pair surrounding the selected text. I even tried selecting the text plus the tag pair. It never occurred to me to simply click the cursor inside the tag itself

[KevinH]

Sorry about that! I should have explained it. It was implemented by request after open / close tag pair highlighting was added and some other related auto selections.

FYI current master has also added a related feature that will let you double click in a tag to select its contents, and shift double click in a tag to select both the tag and its contents.

[odamizu]

Don't apologize! I feel silly that I couldn't figure it out

[KevinH]

For those helping out and following along. I have just pushed to the repo a new version of the user guide that has some inconsistencies cleaned up and finally passes epubcheck (at least on my machine).

Interestingly epubcheck does not appear to care about extra images in the manifest that are not used anyplace but flightcrew nicely detects these and complains.

I will be removing them to clean up space unless it turns out we need them for some of the revisions.

In the first post, I have updated the user guide epub again and added revision info so that others can figure out if it is newer than what they have now or not.

The new version is called src_updated_20210220_01.epub.

[Ashjuk]

Originally Posted by KevinH

This epub is starting to get big (13 meg) because of all the photos. I think we will want to try to reduce sizes and depths if need be to get this back to a more reasonable size.

Thanks to all!

Kevin, would you like me to have a look at the image files to see if I can make some savings?

Looking at the folder of images I produced the vast majority are less than 50k in size, but there are a few that could probably be squeezed down.

Current stats: 173 files 7.18MB.

[KevinH]

Yes, that would be wonderful. But please grab the src_updated*.epub from the first post in this thread as I have fixed a number of file naming inconsistencies that occurred over the years so they will not all match what you posted for me originally, plus there are a number of new images associated with new chapters and revised chapters.

There are a few screenshots that I added for my draft chapters that were taken on my mac and could be huge.

Anything you can do to save file size without hurting things too much would be appreciated. If you need me to remake my new images in a different way or in a smaller size, please let me know.

Thank you.

Image processing is not my forte!

[Ashjuk]

OK - I will have a look and see what I can do to reduce the size without sacrificing too much quality.

[Banjo]

I am researching how the Inspector works, and I have a basic plan on how to write the tutorial for that tool.

The inspector appears to be a huge tool, so I suspect that I will write a rather brief overview of its capabilities and add a link to the Google Dev documentation for anyone who wants all the details. I plan on starting out with a definition of the DOM versus the HTML and other high level concepts. Then I will add some examples of how to inspect the nodes etc. etc.

It looks like the version of the inspector being invoked in Sigil has some tabs and tools that are fairly irrelevant to inspecting an eBook, for example network data. Not sure what to do with those.

How close is the Sigil version to the browser version. Is this the same code?