Sigil was designed to make it easy to create great ebooks using the EPUB format. If you are formatting books for your own use, or you are a professional editor publishing books on multiple platforms, then Sigil is for you. You can use Sigil to format and package your books into an EPUB that looks exactly the way you want it to using an advanced set of features that have made Sigil one of most popular EPUB editors available.
This open-source and completely free software is written and supported entirely by volunteers. The current Sigil development team includes Doug Massay and Kevin Hendricks as co-lead developers and maintainers. Previous developers/authors include John Schember, Grant Drake and Dave Heiland. Sigil was originally created by Strahinja Markovic in 2009 and remains completely free to download and use. Support is also provided by other volunteers who contribute code, translations and helpful answers to user’s questions. See the Help=>About menu in Sigil for a complete list of contributors.
The EPUB (electronic publication) format is one of the most popular file formats for ebooks. It is an open and freely available standard that can be used by anyone.
An EPUB ebook is simply a collection of files each with different functionality stored together using the common zip format. These files include your words, images, Table of Contents, stylesheets, fonts and details about your book like author or title. EPUB’s standard format means your book can be read on many e-readers or converted easily to other e-readers not using EPUB.
Your EPUB stores your words and text in the book using an XML form called XHTML of the HTML format (Hyper Text Markup Language) – the same code used by web pages to display text and images. This just means that the files contain your text along with markup codes and tags (like <h1> or <p>) which tell e-readers how to format and display the text – some words could be bold or italic, others could be a paragraph or a heading, etc.
In addition to XHTML tags to control or style the layout, EPUB books typically make use of stylesheets to help organise the use of styles used by the XHTML files. A stylesheet is another file
in the EPUB that contains a list of XHTML tags, classes, and selectors along with instructions on how to display any text using that matches the tag, class or selector, e.g. <h1> (heading level 1) should be larger and centered. This allows you to separate the content of your book from its layout and allows you to easily adjust the look of the EPUB.
Of course, when anyone actually reads an EPUB they don’t see all these XHTML files or stylesheets. The e-reader just displays the text and images like a normal book or web browser – as close as it can to the formatting you defined, even if there are thousands of pages or files.
You don’t have to understand all the details of the EPUB format or understand XHTML formatting codes to start using Sigil. However, if you spend any time with Sigil you will soon need to become familiar with these areas in order to get the most out of the advanced features of Sigil, and, ultimately, to achieve the design you want.
The latest versions of Sigil contain hundreds of changes, bug fixes and new features while still retaining the majority of the same easy to use interface of earlier versions. Almost all of Sigil’s code has been updated and improved with particular focus on the following areas:
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Stability: All known crashes and related bugs from previous versions have been identified and fixed – making Sigil completely stable for updating your EPUBs.
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Robustness: Sigil can correct even more common problems when reading files, and will no longer exit when opening invalid EPUBs. Saving has been enhanced to perform more integrity checks. Splits and merges can now be done exactly where you want without potential data loss. The cursor position is correctly updated between Code View and Preview, and Find & Replace works consistently and accurately over one or all files.
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Performance: Sigil is now significantly faster in many areas: opening and changing tabs, generating a TOC, merging files, bulk renaming, replacing text, etc.
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Flexibility: More preferences, options and features were added to let you use Sigil the way you want.
Recent Major Changes in Sigil include:
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Switch from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine QtWebEngine reduces memory growth and plugs many major memory leaks and has ongoing security and support patches from Qt/Google/Chromium
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Update to Qt6.7.X from Qt 5.15.X
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Removal of Book View because it allowed users to mistakenly create very broken xhtml that was not acceptable in an EPUB. To replace part of its functionality, we created a new external program called PageEdit that is better suited for basic WYSIWYG proofing and simple Edits. Users who know no xhtml or css will probably want to stay with Sigil 0.9.14 as it was the last version to support BookView. More on PageEdit
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and integrating it into Sigil can be found in this chapter.
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Support for Python Plugins to allow users to customize and integrate how they use Sigil into their own workflow and to add the tools they need or want independently from Sigil. These plugins can be downloaded and installed to add extended support to Sigil. These plugins include epubcheck, Access-Aide, KindleImport, Kindlegen, FlightCrew, ePub3-itizer, DOCX Import plugins, and etc. More about plugins, and where to download and how to install them will be described in a later chapter.
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Support for Preserving User Specified entities
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Sigil embeds its own Python interpreter (v3.11.9 at the time of this writing to support Python 3 based plugins.
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Sigil uses a specially modified version of Google’s Gumbo Parser to auto correct xhtml parsing errors according to the html5 and xhtml specs.
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Sigil now fully supports editing and creating reflowable EPUB2 and EPUB3 EPUBs.
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Sigil has removed its longtime restrictions on EPUB
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layouts. Custom EPUB layouts are fully supported.
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