Future Release To-Do Items

[KevinH]

If anyone else has downloaded the test builds or made their own builds from master and could test some of the new features listed in the first post in this thread, we would love to hear about it, good or bad.

[KevinH]

Also, I would love to hear people's thoughts on point 2 on the list:

2. Consider adding "Use Unicode" to Find & Replace Regex options (*UCP)

It would involve adding a new item to the PullDown and then properly handling that option during search (it is one of the few regex options that must always be first in the regex code). So it shoudl not be difficult and we already have to update the Search Chapter in the Sigil user's guide to handle the new Search Where catagories just added.

So thoughts anyone? Especially from non-english character set epub developers? Add it or rely on Saved Searches where adding the necessary regex code us be done easily once and recalled.

Thanks.

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Also, I would love to hear people's thoughts on point 2 on the list:

2. Consider adding "Use Unicode" to Find & Replace Regex options (*UCP)

It would involve adding a new item to the PullDown and then properly handling that option during search (it is one of the few regex options that must always be first in the regex code). So it shoudl not be difficult and we already have to update the Search Chapter in the Sigil user's guide to handle the new Search Where catagories just added.

So thoughts anyone? Especially from non-english character set epub developers? Add it or rely on Saved Searches where adding the necessary regex code us be done easily once and recalled.

Thanks.

Most of my use of Sigil is in either editing purchased books so I can read them (bad eyesight not compatible with fancy-pants formatting), or doing OCR on old texts and turning the result into a proofed epub (think 1920s or 30s pulp mystery magazines). I do these for my own enjoyment, not for publication or distribution.

For the new books, I suppose the need to find and replace unicode characters could come up at any time, but I haven't hit one yet. In these cases I'm mostly interested in (for example) finding and making readable some 0.2em sized set of footnotes so I have a chance of reading them without constantly changing text size on my reader. So I'm mostly concerned with css and tag names.

Surprisingly, the old magazines and books have a lot of diacritic characters. Think Sax Rohmer and his fake Arabic transliterations! But if Tesseract gives me é or û, it is so far always a single character, not a multiple-character unicode grapheme. And if I use my compose key to type anything with an accent, it also comes out as a single character. But I suppose all this will change at some point.

I had a look at this article, and it makes my head ache to see what I might have to start typing to get unicode matches. But I once thought that about plain old regex. And if I suddenly need it...well, nice to have it there.

So just in terms of future-proofing, and since it seems not too hard, I would be in favour of adding the unicode support.

[DNSB]

I tend to agree with @retiredbiker. I don't have much use for Unicode search replace at this time but there are some authors who love odd character names where it would come in useful.

[KevinH]

Since I heard no one against the idea, I have added "Unicode Property" to the RegexOptions pull down menu, and updated the Find Replace, Saved Search and Controls code to handle it.

This has now been pushed to master.

I have also updated the first post of this thread to indicate the status of all of the open Feature Requests we have received and accepted so far.

Given all of the new features, we have had to make a lot of additions to the strings to be translated. This will obviously require more work by our volunteer translators on Transifex.

So even though we are not close to a new release, I have pushed the new base for translations (base.ts) to Sigil master.

This will give translators a long lead time to translate all of the recent changes and to reach the new hurdle of 85% translated for inclusion into Sigil releases.

[BeckyEbook]

I'm writing regarding the new "Selected Misc XML Files" option in the F&R window.
As far as I remember, Sigil never opened any files from the Misc folder in the Code View window. To open these files (if I have to) I usually use the "Open With" option, i.e. open in an external editor.

Currently (with me), the option to search with "Selected Misc XML Files" simply does not work.

I only noticed this today, when updating the Polish translation.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by BeckyEbook

I'm writing regarding the new "Selected Misc XML Files" option in the F&R window.
As far as I remember, Sigil never opened any files from the Misc folder in the Code View window. To open these files (if I have to) I usually use the "Open With" option, i.e. open in an external editor.

Currently (with me), the option to search with "Selected Misc XML Files" simply does not work.

I only noticed this today, when updating the Polish translation.

Thanks for letting me know. Yes for search to actually work, a QTextDocument must exist. So what exact files types did you select in BookBrowser before running the search? What was its MediaType?

Right now the code only recognizes the following media types for this search:

QList <Resource *> BookBrowser::ValidSelectedMiscXMLResources()
{
    QStringList mts = QStringList() << "application/ttml+xml" <<
                                       "application/smil+xml" <<
                                       "application/smil" <<
                                       "application/pls+xml" <<
                                       "application/oebps-page-map+xml" <<
                                       "application/vnd.adobe-page-map+xml" <<
                                       "application/adobe-page-template+xml" <<
                                       "application/vnd.adobe-page-template+xml" <<
                                       "application/xml" <<
                                       "text/xml";
    return ValidSelectedResourcesByMT(mts);
}

I thought all of these types were given their own QTextDocument that allowed editing. If not, I will have to change Misc/MediaTypes.cpp and FolderKeeper.cpp to make sure these get assigned to something we can edit.

FWIW I have edited both adobe page map xml and smil media overlay before in Sigil. They should open and be editable just fine.

[KevinH]

Perhaps the issue is TabManager does not know about XMLResource files. I will look into changeing that.

[KevinH]

@BeckyEbook
Okay fixed a couple of typos in FindReplace that stopped Misc XML files and JS files from being searchable, and added some missing headers in TabManager.cpp (that probably are not needed but to be safe). And fixed up a few things in MediaTypes that may confuse
javascript and xml resource types.

I have pushed all of this to master.

To test I grabbed the epub3 test of Moby Dick with MediaOverlays.
After opening, I selected the two smil files in BookBrowser and then fired up search to Selected MiscXML Files and then search for "para2" which was successfully found once in each file.

Please give it a try now.

I think the only uneditable xml file that appears in Misc is the ibooks one which is only put there as a hack since it lives in METAINF anyway.

[KarlG]

I'd like to add another couple of feature requests pls...

Would it be possible to delete files with different endings at the same time? At the moment, if I select two files with different endings e.g. .xml, .xpgt I can't right click and select delete. In fact, I don't get any options at all when I right click with both selected.

Could we have an option to format css? And if yes, can we format it so that { and } are on lines of their own?

When doing find / find replace would it be possible to leave the last entry in the find window instead of clearing it? I ask because sometimes I use complicated regexes and if I get it wrong I don't want to have to type it again. (I know it's normally in the drop down list, but I'm using Becky's tip to block popups so the drop-down list doesn't appear for me)

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KarlG

Could we have an option to format css? And if yes, can we format it so that { and } are on lines of their own?

You already have the option to format css. But no, there is currently no way to specify formatting preferences. They are what they are. When right-clicking on css code (in Code View) and selecting Reformat CSS from the context menu; the choices are "Multiple Lines Per Style", and "Single Line Per Style". But with multiple, the opening "{" is always going to be with the first line.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by KarlG

I'd like to add another couple of feature requests pls...

Would it be possible to delete files with different endings at the same time? At the moment, if I select two files with different endings e.g. .xml, .xpgt I can't right click and select delete. In fact, I don't get any options at all when I right click with both selected.

No, BookBrowser is not a file browser and real paths are different from the virtual "functional" groupings used in Sigil. The BookBrowser's underlying selection model is to allow functions to work on one virtual group at a time making it easier to select subsets of xhml, or css files (which it can do even if those files are in different real folders). This is important for xhtml files split into different folders (ie. separate book or separate chapter folders). Without it drag and drop to set spine order would not work.

You can create a delete files by wildcard or regex plugin to do what you want. It would be quite easy.

Could we have an option to format css? And if yes, can we format it so that { and } are on lines of their own?

You can already format CSS with Sigil, just not like you may want. Again, reformatting css is very doable inside a plugin. Or since you have done so in the past modify our internal css parser to do what you want. My guess is it would take very minimal changes to do that given it already provides formatting strings that use used when serializing a parsed css file. Maybe even tweaking a single string value would do what you want.

When doing find / find replace would it be possible to leave the last entry in the find window instead of clearing it? I ask because sometimes I use complicated regexes and if I get it wrong I don't want to have to type it again. (I know it's normally in the drop down list, but I'm using Becky's tip to block popups so the drop-down list doesn't appear for me)

Why? This is self-inflicted behaviour. Use the provided drop down history list or use Saved Searches to store complex searches. My searches are remembered even after they are used and are not cleared even by closing Find and Replace. They are there when I reopen it.

Sorry, but we are looking for generally useful features that can not easily be handled by plugins and not highly subjective requests to change formatting based in a single user's preferences. Give plugins a try. You can use them in many many ways to do things just the way you want. We have a large selection of plugins in our Plugin Index that you can use as examples. Or for your css change, modify your own copy of Sigil.

[KarlG]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

You already have the option to format css. But no, there is currently no way to specify formatting preferences. They are what they are. When right-clicking on css code (in Code View) and selecting Reformat CSS from the context menu; the choices are "Multiple Lines Per Style", and "Single Line Per Style". But with multiple, the opening "{" is always going to be with the first line.

Ah ok, great. I didn't realise that option was there.

[KarlG]

@KevinH. Understood. Plugins are the way to go then

[BeckyEbook]

I've been doing tests on Moby Dick and it's OK now.
The files open in Code View and the search works.
I also confirm that the exception is the file com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml

@DiapDealer: In addition to my own build, I also used today's deploy version. The problem mentioned earlier is still present.
If I switch the theme from dark to light in Windows then Sigil switches (also dynamically, without closing Sigil). This works OK.
But if I have dark mode set on the system and, if only for testing, I would like to switch Sigil to light then the environment variable SIGIL_USES_DARK_MODE=0 makes such a mode "semi dark" (attached image).