How to mark chapter headings

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

My copy of Sigil also replaces the </p> with </h2> when I use the second header style. I have no idea why yours leaves the </p> alone.

Thats a typo on my part - my point being that leaving the class is not desired in this case. Yes if the *only* point of applying header tags was for building a TOC I can see why you would be happy with it. But the fact is that unless the original style had everything specified on it (which often it doesn't) then applying a heading tag will screw with the appearance, and you end up with a frankenstein of whatever the original text was plus whatever the defaults for the heading are.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I don't want my headings to have the same style as my paragraph text. *Ever*

But the class could be anything, and whether or not it affects the style of the heading is something that cannot be determined without a deeper analysis of the CSS. Take this example:

p { margin: 0; text-indent: 1em; }
h2 { text-align: center, margin: 2em 0 1em 0; }
.important { font-style: italic; color: red; }

If you have <p class="important">, you'd probably want it to be <h2 class="important">

[Serpentine]

Originally Posted by Jellby

If you have <p class="important">, you'd probably want it to be <h2 class="important">

Personally, while I can see what you're getting at; it's such unexpected behavior that I'm sure it does more harm than good.

I think if that were the case that headings were important, they would be made as such in their css (i.e. h2 {...}), rather than indirectly. If it were not the case, and this were somehow special, I'm sure someone editing would have no problem moving the tag by hand in the code view. Considering they are using the book view for editing, do you really think that they understand this?

It's just one of those things which should be kept as simple as possible, especially if the future holds custom tag/class etc options for that menu.

[kiwidude]

Perhaps there are two distinct use cases here.

Use Case 1: your chapter heading already has a distinct class assigned to it that is dedicated just to those headings. In that circumstance your only reason for using the <heading> style dropdown is for the purposes of building a TOC. Note however that unless your heading style is very highly specified you are still going to alter the appearance of your headings, which may or may not be desirable. This is what the current Sigil behaviour suits well as per the example from Jellby above.

Use Case 2: You are using Sigil as a book editor to cleanup a book, and the chapter headings do not already have a dedicated style. In this case the chapter headings are often intermingled with standard paragaraph text, heck sometimes even appended to the end of a paragraph block if its a really bad scan/conversion. Here is where you don't want Sigil to be "inheriting" whatever rubbish style the headings had previously underneath.

I've only ever used Sigil book view to apply headings in the second case, since other than for splitting pages it is the only time I would edit in book view. I guess I saw the heading dropdown with "Heading 1" etc similar to choosing a heading style in word - once applied, your text gets that (and *only* that) "heading style". Which used to be the case, the text would only get a <h3> or whatever tag around it.

I don't know the answer, I just find the current behaviour not useful since I am unlikely to go through a retail ePub page by page changing styles in book view to build a TOC, since regex is way faster. Anyways, hope that explains it better from my head.

[meme]

Hmm, well I can see why both might be desired. But I'd guess that if you are using Book View then you don't really know or care much about the HTML underneath (at least for the time you're using Book View). In that case you might want the selection of the format to nuke all other formats. And if you want to retain those classes, you are more likely to use Code View anyway since Book View will often not apply styles in the way you want. Whether it'll change or not is another issue, but it might be something you can customize in the new version.

[Thalia Helikon]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Perhaps there are two distinct use cases here....

Use Case 2: You are using Sigil as a book editor to cleanup a book, and the chapter headings do not already have a dedicated style. In this case the chapter headings are often intermingled with standard paragaraph text, heck sometimes even appended to the end of a paragraph block if its a really bad scan/conversion. Here is where you don't want Sigil to be "inheriting" whatever rubbish style the headings had previously underneath.

I've only ever used Sigil book view to apply headings in the second case, ...- once applied, your text gets that (and *only* that) "heading style". Which used to be the case, the text would only get a <h3> or whatever tag around it.
)

Some of my epubs are converted from Microsoft word, from plain text, or --God help me --from PDFs, and they have layers and layers of garbage.

I only work in code view in Sigil, and I select each rubbish paragraph style, do a global search and replace each one with <p>. Then I find the Chapter hypercode, and perform a global search and replace with <h2>.

I would be perfectly content to have only 2 categories in my ebook-- <p> and <h2>-- all I want is flowable text that is left aligned and a table of contents.

I would rather spend more time READING a book than fussing endlessly.

As I said, I don't know CSS, and I don't know HTML-- I'm learning as I'm doing. I borrow regex strings from this forum to clean up page headers and footers from scanned books, or extra carriage returns from text files. Each time I'm successful, I'm ready to learn something new.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Sorry meme but we are going to agree to disagree on what it does being "right" on this one

I don't want my headings to have the same style as my paragraph text. *Ever*. But that is what the current Sigil behaviour does. In the "good old days" if I had a really badly formatted document (maybe a bad ocr where a regex isn't going to find all occurrences) I would use Book View to scroll through, fix paragraphs, chop pages, give the chapter headings an h3 or whatever style, flick to the stylesheet to add h3 {text-align: center} and it would be job done.

However now it is pointless using the book view style dropdown. Inheriting its existing styles is in my mind a regression that took place in 0.4.x compared to its original behaviour. Clearly you know way more than me about how difficult this is underneath the covers, I just found it strange it used to work the way I want it.

So change the class for your chapter headers. Sigil isn't changing them because they could be correct.

[JSWolf]

Let me make this simple and show you how it's done and how to do it your way easily.

I'll start with chapter headers using <p class="para">Chapter One</p>. We change that to <h2 class="para">Chapter One</h2>. With me so far? Good. Now you've fixed all the chapter titles to be <h2 class="para">chaptertitle</h2> and that's good except you don't want the class there. Now the easy part begins. All you do is search <h2 class="para"> and replace it with <h2>. See, easy. All it takes is one extra simple step and it works and it gets the job done.

Did you follow that?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Let me make this simple and show you how it's done and how to do it your way easily.

I'll start with chapter headers using <p class="para">Chapter One</p>. We change that to <h2 class="para">Chapter One</h2>. With me so far? Good. Now you've fixed all the chapter titles to be <h2 class="para">chaptertitle</h2> and that's good except you don't want the class there. Now the easy part begins. All you do is search <h2 class="para"> and replace it with <h2>. See, easy. All it takes is one extra simple step and it works and it gets the job done.

That would work fine, I guess... if I wanted to spend all day correcting an ebook with 100+ chapters.

Or I could just search for <p class=.*?>Chapter(.*?)</p> and replace it with <h2>Chapter\1</h2> and call it a day.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Let me make this simple and show you how it's done and how to do it your way easily.

I'll start with chapter headers using <p class="para">Chapter One</p>. We change that to <h2 class="para">Chapter One</h2>. With me so far? Good. Now you've fixed all the chapter titles to be <h2 class="para">chaptertitle</h2> and that's good except you don't want the class there. Now the easy part begins. All you do is search <h2 class="para"> and replace it with <h2>. See, easy. All it takes is one extra simple step and it works and it gets the job done.

Did you follow that?

I do it all in 1 pass: <p class="para">Chapter One</p> and create a unique class just in case I want to style it (now or later). (The bloat, is tiny for chapter heads.

<p class="para">Chapter (.+)</p>

<h2 class="chapno">Chapter \1</h2>

.chapno {display: block}

[Jellby]

If all your <h2> are class="chapno", you don't need the class at all to style them.

It might be interesting, however, to have the possibility of styling the word "Chapter" and the chapter number (and the title, if any) separately, with something like this:

<h2><span class="name">Chapter</span> <span class="num">1</span><br/>
<span class="title">An Unexpected Party</span></h2>

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Jellby

If all your <h2> are class="chapno", you don't need the class at all to style them.

It might be interesting, however, to have the possibility of styling the word "Chapter" and the chapter number (and the title, if any) separately, with something like this:

<h2><span class="name">Chapter</span> <span class="num">1</span><br/>
<span class="title">An Unexpected Party</span></h2>

There are all sorts of fun variations. This is one I recently saw:

<h2 class="calibre9" id="calibre_pb_21"><span class="calibre10"><span class="calibre28">&nbsp;CH</span>A<span class="calibre28">PTER<br />
  1&nbsp;</span></span></h2>

The "A" appears to be is about 20% bigger (the rest is really at 80%)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That would work fine, I guess... if I wanted to spend all day correcting an ebook with 100+ chapters.

Or I could just search for <p class=.*?>Chapter(.*?)</p> and replace it with <h2>Chapter\1</h2> and call it a day.

But some books don't use the work Chapter. So you can get One, Two, Three, etc.. for your chapter titles. So there's no way to fix it easily with regex is the class uses is also used elsehwere in the book. The way I suggested uses the heading option to change the chapter headers from <p to <h2 and that gives you then the way to do the search/replace easily. So sure, your way would work only if Chapter was a used word in all the chapter titles.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

I do it all in 1 pass: <p class="para">Chapter One</p> and create a unique class just in case I want to style it (now or later). (The bloat, is tiny for chapter heads.

<p class="para">Chapter (.+)</p>

<h2 class="chapno">Chapter \1</h2>

.chapno {display: block}

That's a bit of code bloat I would say. Why not just use...

<h2>Chapter 1</h2>

and then set h2 as you want for the chapter titles in the CSS?

h2 {
margin-top: .75em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
text-align: center
}

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That's a bit of code bloat I would say. Why not just use...

<h2>Chapter 1</h2>

and then set h2 as you want for the chapter titles in the CSS?

h2 {
margin-top: .75em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
text-align: center
}

Because I might want to use h2 for other things (Sigil does allow them to be marked not in TOC ) with other style.

My chapno usually has Chapter head Margins (and padding for off center placement).
Sheesh! that bloat is minimal. There are lots more frequently (mis)used styling in every single paragraph.