Sigil niggles

[jwes]

These are all not critical or even that important, but would make Sigil more convenient for me to use.

1. Open the 'Insert Special Character' window. Type something in the search and replace boxes, and click on find. When found, click on a special character. It goes into the replace box. I also have had a couple crashes inserting special characters into search and replace boxes, but I can't reproduce them.

2. Setting the focus by clicking in the find and replace boxes should select all the text in the box, like what happens when you press tab in the find box.

3. The font in the find and replace boxes make it hard to distinguish between straight and curly quotes.

4. Dry run replace lists lines to be changed in each section from last to first. It would be less confusing if it were first to last.

5. If there is a horizontal scroll bar in the preview, after a find keep the scroll as far to the left as possible while still showing the result of the find.

6. If you double click on an image or select 'Open Tab for Image' and then close the image, the tab shown is the rightmost tab. It would be nice if it went to the tab reflected in the preview window.

7. After opening a css file, clicking in the preview window does not sync with the corresponding code tab. When proofreading, I find myself scrolling through the preview window, finding a problem that requires changing a css file, fixing it, going back to scrolling through the preview window, finding another problem, clicking on it, switching back to the code tab, and finding myself back at the previous problem.

8. Is it possible to set the delay before updating the preview window when typing in the code window? I work with OCR texts, and sometimes an image has text that was not OCRed, and I will be typing the text from the image, and the image keeps flashing as the preview window updates.

9. When the preview window updates, it appears to flash to the start of the section and then show the current position. Is that flash necessary?

[KevinH]

1. That is expected behaviour. It will paste to the previous last window open that has focus. If you can get a producible crash please provide the instructions how.

2. Why?

3. You control your ui fonts and size through Sigil Preferences. Find and Replace will inherit those. You can of course use qt stylesheetsettings (.qss) to further modify things.

4. Which order are you talking about? Search order and direction are controlled by your last Find and Replace setting. Please provide a sample epub and exact sequence of steps needed to see what you are referring to.

Update: in order to do multiple replaces in a single file, you must make the replacements from the bottom of the file upwards so that the file positions of each match are kept correctly. Doing a replace starting at the top of the file first will not work as any other starting locations are now incorrect unless the replaced string jast happened to have exactly the same number of characters as the string being replaced. If you only find and replace one at a time and repeat this is not an issue but for bulk lists of file replacement locations like DryRun and Replacement Tables, doing them in reverse order matters.

So that reverse order is a requirement for both the DryRun and Full Replacement Table versions of ReplaceAll.

5. Preview scrolling is automatic to centre a particular piece of code / curser. Nothing I can do here as QWebEngine controls that. The easiest solution is to undock Preview and move it to another screen and grow it to prevent the need for horizontal scrolling. If you only have one monitor, then click in Preview then use Sigil's zoom bar to zoom Preview out to prevent the need to scroll.

6. You control which tab is closed. And showing a particular image and closing it adds it to the current tab order. Just close the tab you want.

7. I am not seeing this at all. I can open any xhtml file so it shows in Preview. Then in CodeView open a CSS file that is linked to that xhtml file and see live changes. Sometimes if a css change is broken then Preview is not updated. Hitting the manual reload button in Preview fixes that.

8. That is already a variable delay. As long as you are actually still typing, no update of Preview is scheduled. If you pause typing, then after a short interval Preview will auto update.

9. Yes we are reloading the full xhtml file in Preview and then scrolling to where CodeView
tells us to go. I can not see this on my MacOS machine but I use normal file sizes with few images and I have a fast machine.

On a slower machine with many images, fonts and larger than typical file sizes (ie. cramming more than one chapter into a single file) the reload delay becomes more noticeable.

Splitting xhtml to hold only one chapter, and turning off auto red squiggle spell checking normally helps speed things up.

Many many niggles just go away when using normal size xhtml files with just one chapter per file. Splitting monolithic multi-chapter files should always be your first step.

[BeckyEbook]

Ad 2. No, no… Why? Triple click = select all, but not by default.

Ad 3. I mentioned it here. I personally use the Consolas font here, which indeed IMHO has a better distinction between apostrophes and quotation marks.

#cbFind, #cbReplace {font-family: "Consolas"; font-size: 12px;}

[jwes]

Originally Posted by KevinH

1. That is expected behaviour. It will paste to the previous last window open that has focus. If you can get a producible crash please provide the instructions how.

If you press a key, it goes into into the code window. It should be the same for both, and I would prefer it to go into the code window.

Originally Posted by KevinH

2. Why?

Because generally you want to completely replace what is in the box, not edit it. Also most text editors work this way.

Originally Posted by KevinH

4. Which order are you talking about? Search order and direction are controlled by your last Find and Replace setting. Please provide a sample epub and exact sequence of steps needed to see what you are referring to.

See the attached image and look at the offsets. It turns out if I click on Offset and then click on Book Path, it sorts the way I want, but it should be the default.

Originally Posted by KevinH

6. You control which tab is closed. And showing a particular image and closing it adds it to the current tab order. Just close the tab you want.

The problem is which tab it shows after I close the image tab. I would like it to be the file I was working on that shows in the preview and not whatever file was rightmost before I opened the image.

Originally Posted by KevinH

7. I am not seeing this at all. I can open any xhtml file so it shows in Preview. Then in CodeView open a CSS file that is linked to that xhtml file and see live changes. Sometimes if a css change is broken then Preview is not updated. Hitting the manual reload button in Preview fixes that.

Try this. Load an xhtml file. Right click on a class and select 'Go To Link Or Style'. Scroll the preview window down a few pages and click on a line. Now close the css tab or click on the xhtml tab. The xhtml tab and the preview window go back to where they were before scrolling. What I would like is for a click in the preview window to sync the xhtml tab to the corresponding position even if the xhtml tab is not the active tab. Of course, I could remember to switch back to the xhtml tab before scrolling the preview window.

Originally Posted by KevinH

8. That is already a variable delay. As long as you are actually still typing, no update of Preview is scheduled. If you pause typing, then after a short interval Preview will auto update.

It's that short interval I would like to make longer. I'm not a great typist and when the image in the preview window jumps and flickers, it makes me worse. This goes with the problem below.

Originally Posted by KevinH

9. Yes we are reloading the full xhtml file in Preview and then scrolling to where CodeView
tells us to go. I can not see this on my MacOS machine but I use normal file sizes with few images and I have a fast machine.

On a slower machine with many images, fonts and larger than typical file sizes (ie. cramming more than one chapter into a single file) the reload delay becomes more noticeable.

Splitting xhtml to hold only one chapter, and turning off auto red squiggle spell checking normally helps speed things up.

If you could suppress refreshing the display until after scrolling, it would be cleaner, but I don't know if that would be difficult.

[jwes]

Originally Posted by BeckyEbook

Ad 2. No, no… Why? Triple click = select all, but not by default.

Because more often I want to enter something new rather than change what is there. The one that gets me is when I have a single space in the replace box and I end up adding extra spaces. Also most text editors work this way. Try other programs with find/replace and see.

[theducks]

I simply use ctrl-a if I want All

... and I do edit replaces all the time to make small changes

[BeckyEbook]

Originally Posted by jwes

Because more often I want to enter something new rather than change what is there. The one that gets me is when I have a single space in the replace box and I end up adding extra spaces. Also most text editors work this way. Try other programs with find/replace and see.

Not exactly. Calling the F&R box by Ctrl-F selects the search text and this is the default action, but changing the focus is not at all.

Edit: ...although indeed in 80% of the editors checked, the text is selected.

[BeckyEbook]

Ad 4. As far as I remember I requested the reverse order myself, but I can agree that the default ascending order would be better.

So if @KevinH doesn't see a problem here - I'm all for it.

Reverse order is relevant for single substitutions that make after constantly changing offsets for further finds in the text, not for bulk substitutions.

[KevinH]

@jwes,

1. No, it works as designed. Click where want the target before opening the Insert Special Character.

2. No, there are alternatives to "select all" that others replied with. Use those.

4. Search order is fixed in reverse for DryRun and ReplacementTable as explained in the update in my reply. The explanation of why it is done this way makes it clear, this is not not changing.

6. Tab Manager always choses the next tab to show when one is closed, the current contents of Preview has no impact on that. Just double click in BookBrowser to open any tab.

7. There is no way to force sync to the contents of any inactive tab.

8 and 9. I will look into ways for a user to use an environment variable to override the automatic refresh delay.

That said, a Preview refresh is a full fresh QWebEngine load and scroll and there is no way around that. I can not stop Preview (or any webpage that is reloaded) from flashing on old or slow systems.

[BeckyEbook]

Ad 4 again.
I understand that the reverse order is important in the function itself, but could the default DISPLAY in the window be in ascending order, with the function itself doing the replacements from the end?

[KevinH]

Why? Then we would have to do repeated sort all records before applying the replacements (once per file). Why keep two different orders when one is all that is needed.

[KevinH]

FWIW,
Allowing a user to use an environment variable to override the default Sigil Preview Timeout of 1000 (milliseconds) is straight forward. I will add in a constraint of a minimum of 100 ms and a maximum of 10,000 ms for sanity sake.

I will add this to my todo list for the next release after this upcoming one right after the Easter holidays.

[jwes]

Originally Posted by KevinH

@jwes,

1. No, it works as designed. Click where want the target before opening the Insert Special Character.

Why does Insert Special Character go to a different window than a keypress? That seems wrong to me.

[KevinH]

Because when you open the Insert Special Character dialog you are stealing the focus away from whatever had it. Whatever had that focus last is the target for the Dialog whether it is a CodeView, the Find field or the Replace field or another field in a completely different Dialog.

That was the whole design from the beginning and after more than 10 years, I am not making ui changes without really good reasoning.

That is not changing.

Happy for suggestions for changes or new features and will consider them, but that in *no* way guarantees these changes or requests will ever be accepted into Sigil master.

[DiapDealer]

If I had my druthers, all phrases that begin with, "Most text editors..." would get silently deleted.