16 | Sigil Features

In this section, we put Sigil in the spotlight to focus on some of its features and quirks. No action required. This falls under know-how.

Book View and Code View

Before going any further, it's time to learn a couple important Sigil features — specifically, Book View and Code View, and the difference between them.

The two Views are controlled by these two icons:

Click between those two settings a couple times to get familiar with how each view looks.

Book Browser And Active Files

This is a Sigil anatomy thing. You need to learn where to look at the Sigil pane to reference where you're at in the EPUB file. There are two main places to check: The Book Browser pane, and the tabs above the center display pane.

This is what projectx looks like when it's first loaded into Sigil. Check the red circles. The left-most circle highlights the book browser, which is like a sidebar menu of all the files and folders inside your EPUB.

The circle on the right highlights the tabs above the center display pane.

Later on, after we've done more work, the Book Browser pane and the display tabs show more stuff: (this is a sample taken from one of my own EPUBs for reference)

It's important to know where you're at inside an EPUB, also to learn how to move between files. The quickest and easiest way is to double-click into files using the Book Browser listing.

The following feature highlights how important it is to pay attention to where you're at in an EPUB file…

(Sigil's) Find & Replace

Sigil's Find function will only search inside whichever file happens to be selected. For instance, if you're looking for <h1> while chap1.html is active in the center display pane (as seen above) Sigil will search ONLY chap1.html <h1>. Sigil will NOT search the entire EPUB file for <h1>. It will not move onto the next file or Section once it's done searching chap1.html.

This is why we're tackling all our production slugs before we add the pagebreaks, which entails splitting projectx.html into multiple files. This way, we're dealing with the entire projectx file, rather than multiple files.

Later, after we've worked through the slugs and split projectx into its partitions, if you need to search for something, remember to check ALL the files (or a specific file), not just whichever file happens to be active.

In other words, if you can't find something, before rage-quitting, make sure you're in the correct file/partition while searching. Yet another reason why key_projectx list is so important: it's really useful for figuring out where to look for stuff.

Spacer Lines (The Sigil Way)

Short discussion on Sigil's ability to add blank lines…

In Sigil — theoretically — it’s fine to throw a spacer-line between things like a chapter header and the first line of text. Or, as on the EPUB’s title page, between the book’s title and author name.

In Book View: It couldn't be easier to add a blank/spacer line while in Book View. Book View makes the central display pane work just like any other word processor. Click where you want the spacer line to appear, and press Enter.

Switch into Code View, and you will see that Sigil adds this line of code:

<p><br /></p>

That spacer-line code should perform fine, but I can’t guarantee with a hundred-percent certainty that the spacer-line will show up on all e-reader devices and apps. For that reason, please do not rely on these spacer-lines for anything vital. No guarantees, sorry.

Illustrated:

In Book View, add a spacer line just as you would in any other word processor.

Click back into Code View and a new line of code has appeared: (Line 16)

Spacer lines can be added wherever the user wants, but again: Do not depend on these. I cannot guarantee they will always render on every device and app.

Spacer Lines (The SAFE Way)

Please remember that blank lines can and do render at the very top and very bottom of the page. When blank lines are used as formatting symbols (as in a scene break or POV swap), readers will miss these important print-convention cues, resulting in confusion and broken immersion. In these scenebreak/POV-swap instances, I recommend using scene break characters in place of blank lines to reduce the chance of losing your reader.

HOWEVER... the <p><br /></p> method described above is not the only way to add a blank space. If a blank space must be produced, there is a better, safer way to do so, by adding an inline style attribute to individual paragraphs. Front and back-matter will probably require a lot of this: See Section 21 for more information.

Click And Drag Re-Order

The physical order of content is very important in EPUB. Luckily for us all, Sigil makes it dead easy to move files around within our EPUB.

On the left side of the Sigil window, you'll find a pane with "Book Browser" at its head. Beneath this is your file directory, showing all the folders and files currently existing in projectx.

The first folder listed is Text. Within this folder are a bunch of individual files. There will be a lot more later once we break projectx up into its front and back-matter sections, as well as chapters and the table-of-contents created in later steps.

What's really nice about Sigil is that if we ever want to change the order of those files, those files can be simply dragged and dropped into the desired order, and Sigil will change the order for us under the hood, too.

One common instance of this is Sigil's table of contents; it puts the TOC first in the files, and I've yet to have a client want it left in that position. I always pull the TOC down to just before the start of chapter 1/prologue unless specifically asked to leave it at the very beginning of the file.

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