John's Blog

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.7.2. This release is primary a bug fix release but does come with a few new features. Please see the changelog for a full listing.

Find & Replace now has a Marked Text option. Basically, you can select a section of text, mark the text and find and replace will only operate in the marked section. If you start typing the marked area will be cleared.

Preview now zooms separately from other views. Previously Preview’s zoom level was linked to Book View’s zoom level.

Tags: release, Sigil.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.7.1. This release streamlines some of the new features introduced in 0.7.0. It also, as always, includes a handful of bug fixes. Please see the changelog for a full listing.

One really useful new feature is the ability to right click on an image url in Code View and view the image in a separarte window. The image in this window is resizable so it will always fit within the window.

The clean source settings were streamlined. This is part of a set of changes to deal with saving and opening non-well formed content. With 0.7.0 Sigil would allow you to save non-well formed HTML files even though they are invalid. However, this introduced an issue where if auto cleaning was enabled on open Sigil would “fix” the non-well formed content. This would often lead to issues. So now Sigil warns when saving non-well formed content so it’s not done accidentally. Finally, when opening if non-well formed content is encountered Sigil will prompt to ignore cleaning those files.

Spell check and find and replace were both enhanced. User feedback in their behavior and fixes were made for issues reported by users.

Finally, a change was introduced to deal with EPUBs where the filename within the container is not UTF-8 encoded. The EPUB spec says that the filename must be UTF-8 encoded but some tools (and zipping by hand) do not always use UTF-8. Instead they use the standard ZIP encoding (IBM code page 437). This isn’t a problem with ASCII characters but becomes an issue when non-ASCII characters are used in the filename. Specially the filename is decoded incorrectly so it doesn’t match what’s listed in the OPF. Now Sigil will check if the general purpose bit 11 is set which specifies that the filename is UTF-8 encoded. Sigil will only decode the filename using UTF-8 if this bit is set and otherwise decode using cp437.

Tags: release, Sigil.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.7.0. The underlying theme for this release is finishing features. If you look back though previous releases you will see features such as spell check and preview that were added and in subsequent releases further enhanced. The goal all along was to intorduce these features, get feedback then enchance them. We wanted to get the features out there in a useable form and slowly evolve them around people’s needs. We also didn’t want to hold useful features simply because they didn’t do everything we wanted. In this release many of these incremental features are now finished. Please see the changelog for a full listing. This release comprises a number of new features and plenty of bug fixes. Some of the biggest changes are:

Features

Live Preview

When split view was first removed this is what was intended. It’s taken small steps though a few different releases but this is what was always intended. The new live preview is a dockable view that can be removed from Sigi’s main window for placement on a second monitor. As you edit your changes will automatically be displayed in the preview area. This way you can see how your changes will look without having to toggle or click around. In addition the preview will continue to show the content from the last HTML tab you had open when you switch to CSS, for example. This way you can see the changes auxiliary files will have on your actual content.

Spellcheck

A lot of changes here which round out the functionality. You’ll notice the spellcheck button is no longer next word, but opens a dialog. All of your misspelled words are shown (and even all correctly spelled words, with a tooltip in the header showing the count of unique words). You can now click a word to show that word in your HTML file (doubleclick for the next occurrence), and choose to Ignore it, add it to a dictionary, or change every occurrence of the word to something you type or one of the suggestions. And you can enable multiple dictionaries at once – so you can have a standard list of names, places, alongside one for the specific book.

Edit TOC

This has been a long time coming but it’s finally here. If you have an existing TOC in a book and want to make a simple change without having to setup headers everywhere, you can now just edit the TOC.

Clips

This has become a very powerful tool and it is now more accessible. The Clips features have been modified to make them a bit more accessible. So you can enable a Clips Bar toolbar showing you your first 20 clips (and they can have keyboard shortcuts too). In addition to defining Clips for html code, you can also make a button for a special character you use often (e.g. create a curly apostrophe button and ctrl-apostrophe to use it). A Clips window is like the clip editor but you just need a single click to select an entry. Basically you can define your own buttons now (well, for simple items). Oh, and there’s an Autofill in Clips that will scan your CSS files and create entries for them, perhaps to save some typing or just for amusement.

Reports

New reports have been added! The All Files report is included to cover Audio and Video files but is useful to see what is in Misc, how large your font files are, etc. The Links report will tell you every anchor link used in the book and whether or not it points to a valid destination. And if you use anchors for footnotes/endnotes it will tell you if your reverse links match. And a small Characters Used in the Book report to see if anything odd made it into the files, and possibly to help with font subsetting (although its probably not ideal for that although it was the original reason for it).

Saving and non-well-formed content

In previous version of Sigil you could not save your work if it was not well formed. Meaning it was not validly constructed XML. This limitation has been removed. The well formed dialog that would popup has also been removed. A new well formed column has been added to the Reports for HTML files. The preferred method for determining the validity of the EPUB is to use FlightCrew. Combined with Reports these two should be used to determine the quality of the structure.

Audio/Video

You can play audio and video files in Sigil, and all the related functions for inserting images, deleting unused images, editing externally have been updated to handle Audio and Video files as well.

Qt 5

Sigil is now using Qt 5. This brings an update to the underlying HTML rendering engine. This means embedded font’s should now display correctly. It also provides support for Audio and Video preview. Due to the change to Qt 5 a number of core, internal pieces were rewritten to take advantage of Qt 5. Qt 5 is still a big rough around the edges (this is especially prevalent on OS X) but the new features far out weight any issues.

One change due to Qt 5 is Qt is now much harder to compile from scratch. It takes a long time to build Qt on Windows and the Qt Project only provides pre-built binaries for 32 bit Windows. As such this release does not have a 64 bit Windows build. This shouldn’t be an issue because even 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit Windows applications. Also, (as far as my testing has shown) there is no decernable performance difference between running a 32 bit vs a 64 bit build of Sigil. Sigil doesn’t do anything that would really take advantage of being a 64 bit application.

Misc

You can search with wrap on or off now, embedded fonts display correctly and random highlighting issues are gone (finally), the Index and HTML TOC now use separate stylesheets for their formatting, and you can bookmark your location to return to later.

EPUB 3 (Not Yet)

Sigil is still an EPUB 2 editor. While some EPUB 3 features (Audio and Video) have been incorporated Sigil is not an EPUB 3 editor. It’s best to think of this release as EPUB 2+ where the plus is the ability (not requirement) to use some EPUB 3 features.

This leads to the inevitable question of when will Sigil support EPUB 3. Eventually. There are a number of issues and questions that need to be sorted out. That said, EPUB 3 is a focus and with this release incorporating Audio and Video EPUB 3 is not being ignored.

Tags: release, Sigil.

Sigil 0.6.2 is now out. This is a small maintenance release to fix issues found in the 0.6.1 release. There is still a known issue with the cursor jumping in CV when saving but it isn’t jumping randomly anymore.

Tags: release, Sigil.

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.6.1. This release is mainly bug fixes but it does have a few new features. For a full list of changes please see the Changelog.

A few notable features are:

• Audio and Video tags will no longer be stripped. Audio and Video files are now put into Audio and Video folders and links are updated properly.
• Clean Source has a new (consider it beta) non-destructive pretty printer.
• You can now control when Clean Source is run automatically. There is also a right click menu entry in Code View.
• Sigil is now more tolerant of mal-formed epubs.
  • If an html file within the epub is not well-formed it will be read as is into Sigil and will be skipped during the book normalization process. This will cause the file to potentially have invalid links to other resources.
  • Handle invalid or duplicate IDs in the OPF.
• Reports have been enhanced

Edit

Two additional changes I forgot to mention. I’m now signing the OS X app with an Apple provided developer certificate. This will allow Sigil to run with Gatekeeper. Also, I’m now providing md5 checksums for all binaries (and source package) on the download page.

Also, The 0.6.1 packages when out without the date for 0.6.1 being set in the changelog. This oversight isn’t a major issue and doesn’t warrant pulling the packages. The Changelog will have the correct release date for 0.6.1 in the next release.

Tags: release, Sigil.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.6.0. This release is the calumniation of thousands of hours of work. It comprises approximately 165 major changes and many more minor ones. Please see the changelog for a full listing.

Stability has been greatly enhanced and crashes should be greatly reduced or non-existant. Cursor positioning between view has also been enhanced and should work consistently (correctly) now.

Some notable new features:

• Goto Link or Style
• Saved Searches
• Clip Manager
• Deleting unused images and styles
• Edit capability in TOC generation
• Inserting special characters
• Change text casing
• Reformatting CSS files
• Various style and file usage reports
• Ease of linking stylesheets and images
• Inserting links and anchors
• Opening files/images with external editors
• Customise the GUI fonts/sizes/colors
• …and so much more…

All of this couldn’t have been accomplished without the help of Grant Drake and Dave Heiland. Without their contributions 0.6.0 would have only had a fraction of these changes.

Tags: release, Sigil.

The next release of Sigil is shaping up nicely. There is so much going into it that the next release will be 0.6.0. Unfortunately, EPUB 3 will not be one of the features making it into 0.6.0. One major change coming will be a new BookView (BV) editor. Here is an unfished preview of what it might look like.

This is only a concept preview of the new editor. One issue that needs to be resolved is the double tool bar. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to use the one in the BV pane or the global one in the window itself.

Tags: bookview, editor, GUI, Sigil.

Sigil 0.5.3 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release and does not include any new features. Just bug fixes.

Tags: release, Sigil.

0.5.2 is now available for download! This is only a bug fix release but it fixes the “add existing file” feature that broke with 0.5.1.

There is no Linux x64 build at this time because my build machine died while building this package. I’ll be looking into options to replace this machine but Linux x64 users will have to make due with the x86 Linux release for the time being. I’ve been having problems with my build machine (since the 0.5.0 release) but this time it looks like it’s might be beyond reviving.

Tags: release, Sigil.

This is primarily a maintenance release with a large number of fixes. Find and replace (F&R), GUI tweaks and spell check were the major focus. Highlights include: F&R now supports wrapping and the ability to search within selected files. The GUI now (hopefully) remembers cursor position when switching views. en_GB dictionary was added, all dictionaires were updated and hyphenation dictionaries are now included by default. For a full list of all changes for this release please see the Changelog.

This release wouldn’t have come off as smoothly, quickly or with as many fixes and new features without the help of meme from MobileRead. Thank you for the time and effort you put into making this release possible.

Starting with this release I want to start making smaller releases with less time between them. I plan to target approximately 4 weeks between releases give or take two weeks. I believe this will make development more fluid and allow for greater user input.

My short term plans for upcoming releases are (not all of these will be in the next release):

• Make book view editing more robust.
• Firebug style element inspection.
• Make code view editing more robust.
• Plugin interface.
• Move auto cleaning and restructuring into plugins.

My long term plans are EPUB 3. This is not a short term goal but I plan / want to make this a reality by the end of this year.

Tags: release, Sigil.