User error?

[pittendrigh]

Sigil use error?

I have a ten year old website that teaches DIY builders how to make a stitch and glue drift boat. Actually I got my domain name in 1998. In fact that's 20 years ago.

Websites don't work well for complex do-it-yourself online information. Epub is an order of magnitude more capable.

I tried using sigil. I got all the text imported into various chapter-like sections without trouble but when I manually (one by one) started importing images (photographs diagrams and dimensions) sigil became unusable. The GUI would grind away for minutes at a time before refreshing. Saving and reopening didn't help.

I purchased Jutoh for a small amount of money and it works just fine. I'll run with Jutoh from here on out (on an AMD64 Mint Linux box with lots of memory).

But I do find myself wondering: "Is sigil incapable of handling large text married to many images? Or did I simply do something wrong?"

It's possible my question can't be answered without exposing my epub file, which I don't want to do just yet. But Jutoh does work well. Very well. And sigil does not. Or at least it seems so.

I'm curious to hear what people think.............

[theducks]

Were you trying to do this as a SINGLE , huge page?

Reading devices wuss out long before Sigil or Calibres viewer will

break your 'project' into task pages (limit each to less than a few dozen pics)

[pittendrigh]

Originally Posted by theducks

Were you trying to do this as a SINGLE , huge page?

Reading devices wuss out long before Sigil or Calibres viewer will

break your 'project' into task pages (limit each to less than a few dozen pics)

Good question but no. I had 14 different "chapter like" pages. Sigil was fine before I started making image links, which in the xhtml are just text links. But the GUI shows a wysiwyg version of each such page, with all those jpegs loaded into memory somehow.

Each such page (of 14 or so, so far, more to come) have something like 5000 words. Sigil was fine with just text. But a boat building book needs lots of images and diagrams. I make blueprint like pages with various open source CAD programs and then export them as jpeg. And then resize the jpegs, with a shell script, to be about 1000 pixels wide or less.

I found a web page somewhere that said epub images were ideally sized at .... something like 1000 pixels wide. Their argument had something to do with hard-coding width to the number of pixels in an IPhone Retina display. Hard coding to specific devices isn't generally a good idea but I had to start somewhere. So I started with that.

Images can always be resized. Down from the original RAWs.

Jutoh does seem to handle big image pages without trouble. Jutoh is a bit of a learning curve. A lot of it works differently than sigil. Today was my first day with Jutoh, after a week of fighting with sigil.

Boat building is complex. When you start off with history and then teach techniques, talk about design and model making and then and only then dive into "how to build this particular boat" it takes lots of words. And images. Web pages come up one at a time.

When a Pad or Phone app reads an epub it's not clear to me how much of the book is loaded into memory at any given time. I haven't tried to read my own book with an app yet.

So far just with editors.

[pittendrigh]

Many ebook retailers won’t even allow you to upload a file larger than 20MB. And even with those that do, such as Apple, you need to consider how many of your readers will be accessing your masterpiece: on a wireless device, where download speeds are slow, and empty space is taken up by cat videos and audio recordings of a niece’s singing recital. Nothing frustrates a reader more than buying your book — but not being able to download it.

On top of that, our favorite elephant in the room, Amazon, deducts fifteen cents per megabyte from every royalty payment as a “transport fee.” [4] (I always imagine a group of burly truckers carrying floppy disks with your ebook on them from a storage locker to the download bay on the other side of Jeff Bezos’s kingdom.)

Ah. The ebook concept is dead for DIY instruction, where embedded video is what you really want. I've heard Apple won't support links to externally supported video.

So..........what's really needed, for image sound and video intensive DIY (how to do it) instruction (how to build a house, how to fix your car, build a boat, play the guitar, learn how to use Photoshop etc) is epub file storage, file organization and visual display--------provided by a web server rather than a phone app.

The phone app genre is crippled! I see that now.

[pittendrigh]

I see this more clearly now. I have long suspected it but actually working with the files and the editors confirms it for me. Hand held devices are fine for mostly black and white books with only a few images or diagrams. I'm reading Thomas Piketty's Capitol in the 21st Century now. Every night.

Picketty's diagrams work on the Kindle version but they're broken on the Playbooks version. I have another book "What the Robin Knows" where the opposite happens. On the bird book the sound files work for the Playbooks version but make no sound on the Kindle version. Bugs and formatting hassles like the above examples will get ironed out over time. I suspect bugs like the above have to do with varying ways of handling relative file paths in package.opf. Some opf files make resources relative to the OPS directory, some make them relative to directory that holds OPS.

But there is no solution to hand held memory limitations for books that are not mostly black and white text. For books that really do require pages of images, sound files AND most of all video there will have to be a server-side way to display epub files, so the images sound bytes and video are served in bits and pieces rather than all at once.

I remember in the early days of web pages developers figured out how to use simple javascript to display multiple images as a slideshow. But those first ugly attempts required the browser to download ALL the images first, before the slideshow started. Then they got smart and sent down a list of image URLs instead. Then the slideshow downloaded one by one, while the previous image was still showing. Now you can even leverage Ajax for asynchronous downloads.

Not all epubs have massive memory requirements. Some will. Some do. The phone app world will never support that functionality. We need a server side way to display epub, as well as a hand held device way. At least for how-to-do-it books that require giant memory.

[DiapDealer]

Do you want to talk about your Sigil image issue, or moan about the limitations of the EPUB format and mobile devices in general?

The former is welcome, the latter needs to take place somewhere else.

[KevinH]

I have many epubs that use lots of images and do not have a problem viewing that epub in Sigil's Preview while simultaneously editing the xhtml in CodeView. So you will need to specify the number and size of the images, the number and size of the individual xhtml files that make up the epub, etc. And how many images used per xhtml file, etc.

One easy way to do this is to unzip the epub and do a dir or ls -l to show files sizes in the Text and Images directories.

Alternatively, you can use a scramble epub utility to scramble the text itself but preserve the links. Or pick just one typical chapter (.xhtml file) of your epub, deleting the remaining chapters and post it.

We can then duplicate that sample chapter and images to create a bigger epub to see if your performance concerns can be replicated.

Are you swiching back and forth to BookView from CodeView or are you editing in Codeview while using the Preview window to show you as you edit?

We need more info here before we can help.

KevinH

[pittendrigh]

Thank you.
Will do tomorrow. Tied up today.

I think the problem was related to too many images on one page. I broke what amounted to a diagrams chapter into 5 different pages and the problem abated. Quite a bit.

I sort of raised two issues in my ramblings above. One was sigil too slow. That's been largely fixed by not having 20 or more images on a single page. There was one 3000 pixel wide image I put on its own page, all by itself. The slowdown is manageable now.

The other issue was my (eventual) desire to write how-to-do-it books with large amounts of embedded video. Perhaps I should have waited a week and put that in a separate thread. I think that's going to need a new technology. Like a PHP plugin to unzip an epub on a webserver. And serve it up as a website that reads epub and looks and acts like it would in hand held reader.

I'll get back to this tomorrow. Do what you suggested.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by pittendrigh

Thank you.
Will do tomorrow. Tied up today.

I think the problem was related to too many images on one page. I broke what amounted to a diagrams chapter into 5 different pages and the problem abated. Quite a bit.

I sort of raised two issues in my ramblings above. One was sigil too slow. That's been largely fixed by not having 20 or more images on a single page. There was one 3000 pixel wide image I put on its own page, all by itself. The slowdown is manageable now.

The other issue was my (eventual) desire to write how-to-do-it books with large amounts of embedded video. Perhaps I should have waited a week and put that in a separate thread. I think that's going to need a new technology. Like a PHP plugin to unzip an epub on a webserver. And serve it up as a website that reads epub and looks and acts like it would in hand held reader.

I'll get back to this tomorrow. Do what you suggested.

As an aside, not directly related to Sigil issues (Diap, please don't beat me), you might look into Adobe's RoboHelp. It's a quite remarkable little thing. I bring this up because of your comment:

...provided by a web server rather than a phone app.

You can create an entire manual in RoboHelp; you can host it online, or you can export the content, selectively or all, into ePUB and MOBI formats. Granted, you can make ePUB/MOBI with Jutoh, but you can't do what RH can do, online, with it.

It's pricey to buy ($1K), but you can lease it for a mere $30/month. I'm in the middle of a massive renovation of our own FAQ/Data system, and that's the method I've chosen to use.

Hitch

[Maui]

Hi,

i tried to edit George R. R. Martins atlas "Westeros" which is an epub having 83 megabytes. And yes, iut takes a whle until Sigil is usable, and yes its a little bit slow. But its not incrdedible slow not unusable.

So maybe a screenshot of the images report would be helpful to see how many images you have and how big they are.

Maui

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Maui

Hi,

i tried to edit George R. R. Martins atlas "Westeros" which is an epub having 83 megabytes. And yes, iut takes a whle until Sigil is usable, and yes its a little bit slow. But its not incrdedible slow not unusable.

So maybe a screenshot of the images report would be helpful to see how many images you have and how big they are.

Maui

Idle curiosity, as I'm sitting here at 6:30 in the morning, taking my online course, waiting for someone to show up--why is it so large? I mean, sure, long books, but, what--lots of maps?

Hitch

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Idle curiosity, as I'm sitting here at 6:30 in the morning, taking my online course, waiting for someone to show up--why is it so large? I mean, sure, long books, but, what--lots of maps?

Hitch

He writes heavy.

[Maui]

Originally Posted by Hitch

--lots of maps?

A lot of Maps as well as other pictures.

[Notjohn]

I'm not sure what's mean by "a lot" of images, but I have several books with two or three dozen. I've more or less settled on 800 pixels wide, and I do try to keep them under 130 KB. My longest book is 140,000 words (340 pages in 6x9 paperback). I've never seen the slightest lag in Sigil.

(Audio nor video, no!)

[pittendrigh]

Ok I'm revisiting my own thread a week later.
I have an old but capable quad core Linux box with a ton of memory.

Is my epub large? Not if it was a website. When it was text only I could manage the editor but as I began to add 2 to four 700 pixel wide images per page sigil became unusable.

Google shows me I am not alone. Many others have the same trouble. So I purchased Jutoh and that works just fine.

ls -l myhd.epub reveals:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sandy sandy 1239863 Mar 26 19:42 myhd.epub

I have 22 chapters or epub *.xhtml sections averaging something like 4000 words each. On those 22 pages or sections I currently have a total 50 or so images. Boat building is complex and I need to add even more. All said images come from original jpegs almost 4000 pixels wide so I can knock them down to any size. I'm running with 700 pixels now because that's what I use on my boat building website.

I wish the sigil developers luck. But I do think they are going to have to fix the software. I am not the only one who has found it so slow it is not unusable. A keyword search on "sigil too slow" reveals many links, including other threads in this forum.

So. I conclude my trouble was NOT due to user error. That's my wrapup report. I am still a big fan of epub, especially epub3. But ........... I'm a bit sour on sigil right now, especially so because Jutoh works so well.