Clips format

[seanos]

Is there any reason why clips can’t be stored in UTF-8 format? It’s disappointing that you can’t even make sense of the basic text file if you speak a language that uses anything other than ASCII, since everything is encoded within the file even though it’s a UTF-8 file.


I can’t help feeling it’s a deeply Anglo-centric choice.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by seanos

Is there any reason why clips can’t be stored in UTF-8 format? It’s disappointing that you can’t even make sense of the basic text file if you speak a language that uses anything other than ASCII, since everything is encoded within the file even though it’s a UTF-8 file.


I can’t help feeling it’s a deeply Anglo-centric choice.

Whoa….! Slow your roll there. Before you start going crazy with accusations (and multi-posting before you give the developers a chance to respond) you need to remember that they are in a different time zone… The developers are very helpful and will be along shortly. Just don’t piss them off by throwing unfounded accusations about their frame of mind when developing a great tool!

Clips seem to work just fine…as they did for you before you tried using them in a non-standard way.

Cheers!

[KevinH]

Anglo-centric ... my word you have a huge chip on your shoulder. Sigil has long supported all platforms and all mainstream languages that Qt supports.

We tried utf-8 ini format back in Sigil 0.9.12 but it was severely broken by Qt (can't encode or decode atomicly which is needed by ini files that support read/writes across multiple instances of Sigil) so we had to revert it in Sigil-0.9.13. as it caused widespread corruption. Check out the ChangeLog.txt or just read the release notes.

Also utf-8 can not encode all binary byte sequences such as widgets storing states, sizes, date-time. In addition Linux allows paths with arbitrary byte sequences.

So not gonna happen.

You should really apologize though for accusing us without any knowledge of why technical choices are made.

[seanos]

Thank you for answering my question.

I’m not even sure what I can productively say about someone interpreting being pro-accessibility as having a ‘huge chip’ on their shoulder.

There is inevitably a gulf between most developers and most end-users. It goes without saying that developers are free to do what they want, but even totally logical decisions may not seem to have any logic to the end-user or their workflow. Sometimes the effort of supporting what seems logical to the end-user is just too complicated or impossible, sometimes it’s possible, sometimes somewhere in between. Not necessarily a simple determination or easy to explain.

From your answer, I’m guessing that the clips.ini uses the same format as other configuration files, which could contain all the things you mention. Given that clips are text and epub files have very well-defined internal paths (which yes, people can change) I’m still not sure I get how those restrictions apply specifically to clips. Is it just simpler just to have one file format? I understand if you have better things to do than give me an example though.

Having an opinion or, as I said, a feeling about something is not making an accusation. I think you’re are 1) reading in, and 2) misunderstanding how change happens.

If no one ever said they felt excluded, then how would anything ever change? None of us are magically pure and free of the biases embedded in our cultures.

[KevinH]

Still waiting for that apology.. You implied we were biased and stated it publicly with no true evidence to back up up your statement.

You also have no technical understanding of how QSettings objects and their ini need to be synchronized across multiple instances of an app.

Want to try again, and this time try leading with "I am sorry, I was wrong to imply you were biased against others."

Instead of what you did: creating your own mess, getting angry and frustrated, making multiple posts implying there was a bug when none exist, implying we were biased against half the globe, then threatening to stop using PageEdit because the feature that was just added is not identical to what was in Sigil.

Or can you just not see it? And so decided to double down instead of just admitting you were wrong and unreasonable due to your frustration, which everyone would have understood.