Sigil is free, open-source editing software for

e-books An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...

in the EPUB format. As a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

application, Sigil is distributed for the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

platforms under the GNU GPL license. Sigil supports code-based editing of EPUB files, as well as the import of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

and

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...

files. A companion application, PageEdit, allows

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

editing of EPUB files. Sigil has been developed by Strahinja Val Marković and others since 2009. From July 2011 to June 2015 John Schember was the lead developer. In June 2015 development of Sigil was taken over by Kevin Hendricks and Doug Massay.

Features

Sigil's features include: * Full

UTF-16 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as cod ...

and EPUB 2 specification support * Multiple views: book, code and preview view *

Table of contents A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page numbe ...

generator with multi-level heading support * Metadata editor with full support for all metadata entries *

Hunspell Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyser designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding and character encoding, originally designed for the Hungarian language. Hunspell is based on MySpell and is backwar ...

based

spell checking In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

with default and user configurable dictionaries * Full

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

( PCRE) support for find and replace * Supports import of EPUB and HTML files, images, and style sheets * Integrated

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

to external HTML and graphics editors * FlightCrew validator for EPUB standard compliance validation (separate plugin) Sigil has full EPUB 2 specifications support, but only limited EPUB 3 support. Since version 0.9.3 of January 2016, the developers have been focusing on "improving Sigil’s ability to work with and generate epub3 ebooks without losing any of its epub2 capabilities".

editing in book view was discontinued in 2019 and moved to a separate application, PageEdit.

References

External links

* *
Old code repository

Sigil development blog

Ebook editing with Sigil

LWN.net LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ...

, 2011 EPUB readers Free application software Cross-platform free software MacOS text-related software Windows text-related software Linux text-related software Typesetting software Desktop publishing software Software that uses Qt {{free-software-stub

Features

See also

References

External links