Sigil 0.4.1 is complete and available. This is mainly a maintenance release and fixes a number of bugs. There are a few new features mostly around the code view. As always see the changelog for a complete list of changes.

About Formatting Tips. Calibre’s robust conversion engine can be leveraged to help with formatting tasks. Converting with calibre helps when you are dealing with a format you cannot easily edit, or a format you aren’t very familiar. It’s also helpful in situations where the insides of the file is such as mess it’s hard to understand. Many of these tasks are geared toward people who already have an ebook in an existing format that they need to clean up....

The Barnes and Noble (B&N) Nook has issues reading covers for EPUB files. Not all Nooks have this issue it’s only the Color and Touch because the original Nook supported reading the cover from an external image file. The Color and Touch will only read covers from the EPUB files themselves (no cover thumbnails unfortunately). This issue with the Nook is caused by B&N not properly implementing the EPUB specification in their device....

Last night I moved Sigil’s SCM from Mercurial (hg) to Git (git). The change was completed successfully and without any issues. 0.4.0 had locations for things like the user manual pointing to the git locations. These are now live and working again. These links are now broken in any release before 0.4.0. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.

Previously I posted about an instance of copyright infringement. It was found that a company called HamsterSoft was using portions of calibre in their proprietary and closed source ebook conversion program. The good news is the situation has been resolved. On August 15th I was contacted by Pavel, one of the founders of HamsterSoft. He said that they are committed to their Hamster Free eBook Converter (HFEC) program and they feel compliance with calibre’s license (the GNU GPL v3) is their only option....

About Formatting Tips. Poetry is one of the hardest elements to get right when formatting an ebook. The biggest issue is poems visually use a fixed width. Each line needs to be easily distinguishable. If they run together the rhyming and meter can easily be thrown off. Ebooks typically allow for reflowable text. This is where the text on screen changes to accommodate the users selected font, font size, and the screen size....

The long awaited Sigil 0.4.0 release is now out. Along with Sigil is a new release of FlightCrew. FlightCrew version 0.7.2 is the latest version bundled with Sigil. If you’re an OS X user then one thing need to be aware of is these two releases bump the minimum OS X version to 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The Linux builds (x86 and x64) are built on Ubuntu 11.04. A lot of work went into 0....

Update: HamsterSoft has fixed the issue and is now in compliance with the GPL. They are no longer in violation of my copyright in regard to calibre Introduction Copyright infringement is something many creators come face to face with. Over the past two months it has been something I’ve been dealing with. A third party is using portions of calibre in their proprietary application in violation of the GNU GPL version 3 (GPL v3) that calibre is licensed under....

About Formatting Tips. There are two types of scene breaks: hard and soft. Hard scene breaks are denoted by a visual separator between paragraphs. Typical identifiers are lines and stars. Soft scene breaks are created by putting white space between paragraphs. They both serve the same purpose but some authors prefer one style over the other. Lets start by setting a style to create print formatted paragraphs. This makes seeing the distinction in the scene breaks easier....

I’ve updated the donation links they now point to my PayPal account. Going forward donations will be directed toward me instead of Strahinja. This is something we had talked about and planned. I just want to warn people who have donated before because you will see a different email address than least time.