I would love to have a split screen editor, like Sigil has in “split view”, with a WYSIWYG editor on top, and HTML editor on bottom.
So I can write, and format, my ebook at the same time. I’m finding writing and formatting go together, at least for technical books where formatting options, and how it ultimately looks, affects how and what I write. I need to see what it looks like to determine if I need to change what I’ve written.
Technical:
Not sure how to go about this though. Sigil uses the CKEditor (ckeditor.com) which is free Open Source, but does offer a Closed Source license for companies and products for which Open Source license is not an option. That might actually work.
Sigil has a linear list on the left of text files, which I can reorder by dragging, similar to Scrivener, but doesn’t support the tree on left like Scrivener, which I very much like.
I also found the free yWriter5 (spacejock.com/yWriter5.html) which looks useful for people writing fiction stories (and actually advertises Scrivener, recommending it for Mac users) but does not appear to be a text editor.
I’m not sure what you mean here, are you saying you want to see the raw RTF code in a split view along with the formatted text? I don’t think that would be terribly helpful to many people. RTF is somewhat dense and difficult to “read”. In an HTML editor like Sigil, I think a code view is more useful because HTML is highly readable and easy to learn—easy enough that one can write in it directly and forego using rich text controls at all. I’ve never really heard of anyone doing that with RTF though!
I’d like to edit HTML files (*.htm), and, I’m really wishing here, (so I might as well wish for some unicorns while I’m at it), I’d like to be able to edit both the HTML code, and have a WYSIWYG editor, like an email editor, that is HTML underneath, but shows me a WYSIWYG editor, and let’s me edit HTML too.
The ckeditor I thought was used by Sigil, but their web site says it’s a component for a web browser.
Yeah, this is definitely a unicorn problem. It has some HTML converters which it uses when you export/compile and make e-books, but the base format is RTF. If you look inside the Files/Docs subfolder of your project that is what you’ll see, just a bunch of RTF files.
If you want pure HTML, the best way to go is MultiMarkdown (basically it’s just Markdown with some extensions for book writing, like footnotes). That’ll give you pristine HTML5 ready code. If you’d rather not switch to writing in a plain-text format though, I’d use Tidy to clean things up after exporting.
It has some HTML converters which it uses when you export/compile and make e-books, but the base format is RTF. If you look inside the Files/Docs subfolder of your project that is what you’ll see, just a bunch of RTF files.