Sigil – A free, open-source, multi-platform eBook editor

200 58 6 years ago

Phenix88be• 6 years ago

I m really frustrated that I can't find a single screenshot of your application. Nothing on Github or the official website.

jaydem• 6 years ago

I have the same frustration. Why would I download a GUI tool without knowing what he tool looks like?

summitsummit• 6 years ago

these situations are so frustrating it almost feels like it was their malicious intent to cause you mental anguish sometimes. "hey, check out this gui tool that you need! not gonna show you what it's like though ;) you just gotta download it and set it up."

captn3m04• 6 years ago

I took a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png

I've used it in the past, and it is quite decent.

paol• 6 years ago

Thank you, I was trying to figure out if it was a WYSIWYG editor or what.

It appears to be largely equivalent to the Calibre editor.

AdmiralAsshat• 6 years ago

It doesn't look that different, at a glance, than the e-book editor included in Calibre.

hombre_fatal6• 6 years ago

What are the puzzle pieces at the top for?

Reminds me of a similar looking UI contraption I saw recently: https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1704/images/921/92... (the multicolored database icons at the top)

filleduchaos• 6 years ago

There's far too many developers that seem entire unaware of the very basics of marketing or how to connect with a target audience that's not other developers.

hombre_fatal6• 6 years ago

Developers want screenshots. The only people who don't need a screenshot are the project contributors.

It's kinda funny how we will spend years collaborating on some project yet not think to spend 30 seconds checking a screenshot into the readme for a project that we supposedly want others to find and use. It's like self-sabotage.

jasonv2• 6 years ago

Personally, not sure I would trust my project, and my time and effort to software written by someone who won't see the value of adding a screenshot to their software's site.

It was started in 2009, and for some reason.. no screenshots.

For me, that breaks trust.

philsnow• 6 years ago

I also went to the web site looking for screenshots, but the "home" page is a detailed changelog. Oh, there's an "About" page, screenshots are probably there-- no, that's a life story of the project.

Neither of these are interesting for the (presumptive) target audience of "people who want to edit epub files".

djsumdog• 6 years ago

Same here. I ended up doing an image search:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sigil+ebook+screenshot&ia=images&i...

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

While I'm not one to get overly angry about it, cause it just kinda happens with a lot of projects as well as with a lot of Linux apps, no screenshots on the distro repo GUI app for a lot of software I tend to agree. It would make a nice contribution to their GitHub, but their homepage should feature a screenshot or two on the side or somewhere immediately visible to someone visiting their website, or at the very minimal a 'Gallery' page.

amzil2• 6 years ago

what is the value of your tool over AsciiDoctor (https://github.com/asciidoctor) ?

wingi• 6 years ago

Is John Romero informed?

amzil2• 6 years ago

What's the value of your tool over using asciidoc tools https://github.com/asciidoctor ?

captn3m04• 6 years ago

It's WYSIWYG, and I can edit existing EPUB files, which is always nifty.

formerly_proven• 6 years ago

Is it, though? https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png Doesn't look like WYSIWYG to me.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

I believe the WYSIWYG part of sigil was forked into PageEdit?

thomascgalvin• 6 years ago

I prefer markdown -> pandoc -> epub. That way I can use whatever editor I like, and I'm not stuck editing HTML by hand.

jesselawson• 6 years ago

Sigil has been around for a while. I used it a few years ago to typeset a sci-fi novel I published through Amazon KDP. Unfortunately it was not as easy for me to use as Apple Pages, which supports saving to ebook directly.

andrewla5• 6 years ago

I haven't played much with any of this stuff, but one thing that I'm curious about is what is the advantage of having a container format like this, rather than just having a single giant HTML file (with embedded CSS & data: uri images)?

For editing this would be ridiculous, but for transport and presentation it seems much more compact and useful. It is easy to target as an output format for a variety of tools, without understanding a bunch of quirks of the format. It would be easier to render, since the application has to make all the decisions about where to place content and support reflowing anyway.

hombre_fatal6• 6 years ago

An .epub is already what you describe; it's a .zip of .xhtml, images, and supporting files you edit directly seen in the sidepanel: https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png

An ebook editor just entails helping you edit those .xhtml files in a slightly more domain specific way, generating a few extra files (like table of contents), and producing the distributable zip.

Though I may have misunderstood which "container format" you were referring to.

andrewla5• 6 years ago

No, what I'm describing is a single .html (or .xhtml file, if you like), compressed and sent on its way. Editing it as a series of xhtml, css, img, and manifest files makes perfect sense -- it allows a human to craft a book using the level of tooling that makes the most sense for them (from a word document to raw html to markdown to more sophisticated tools) but all of those tools can then retarget to a monolith that is easy to define and consume.

Someone• 6 years ago

For long books or books containing large images or videos, that giant HTML file would be so gigantic that many e-readers would be slow at loading them or even fall over (the average e-reader doesn’t have a fast CPU or loads of memory).

I also expect data URIs for images would make the HTML file, even if gzipped, larger than the equivalent ePub.

HTML also isn’t good at doing the book-like things such as pagination, tables of content and on-page footnotes.

andrewla5• 6 years ago

Videos? I guess for some applications. Either way, the giant HTML file is nasty, yes, but the epub would be the same size [1]. It would be harder to process, though, because even XHTML has a nesting structure that doesn't lend itself to decomposition easily.

For the most part ebooks are reflowable, so pagination only matters in the sense of manual page breaks, and HTML has to be extended to handle that even for epub. Similarly on-page footnotes (<aside> in iBook epub and <a href><sup> for Kindle) need to be handled now in HTML extensions.

Tables of contents and indexing content is a little harder, but if the format were well-defined (something like <chapter> tags, or just using <h1> as semantic tags) then it would be easy to generate as well. Or it could just be done using a bunch of <a href> in an explicit TOC -- easy enough for a compiler to handle.

Metadata is in theory more difficult, for things like author, etc., but defining tags in the <head> of the document would be just as easy as the manifest definitions that readers have to deal with now.

[1] gzipping random data base64 encoded is ~3% increase in file size.

jasonv2• 6 years ago

I'm writing a book with three levels out output, think "simple" then "medium" then "advanced".

Writing it in sections and assembling the sections for rendering allows me to also export for multiple targets, and multiple versions.

Think "build" for books.

andrewla5• 6 years ago

For authoring without a doubt having multiple sections makes perfect sense. But as a target a monolith is fine and reduces complexity.

wegs2• 6 years ago

What's the best eBook reader? I'm getting fed up with Amazon, and I'd like to have some kind of clone of the Kindle. Key thing is SaaS -- I'd like my reading positions, notes, etc. to sync between machines and available through a web interface.

Glad to pay a modest amount for hosting on AWS or similar, if I'm in control of my data. Not so glad to do another corporate lock-in.

popup212• 6 years ago

Thorium Reader is an absolute pleasure to use. Open-source and regularly updated.

https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/ https://github.com/edrlab/thorium-reader

onyva3• 6 years ago

Is it more than just an ePub reader? You really feel it’s justified to spin-up an electorn app (!!!) to read an ePub? I use Emacs’ nov.el or Foliate which are not only low on resources but also instantaneous to open files.

abrowne2• 6 years ago

Really wish it was a Chromium extension (or PWA) rather than separate app.

tonypace• 6 years ago

Thorium is astoundingly slow. I've started using Sumatra for ebooks as well as PDFs. It's fast and good enough.

captn3m04• 6 years ago

I’ve been delighted by Foliate. Supports OPDS, and keeps getting better.

onyva3• 6 years ago

Oh didn’t know that. Thanks for the tip. I’ve been using this app on Fedora for a while. Will have a look.

JoeDaDude• 6 years ago

Calibre is usually the go-to open source ebook reader. I don't know about SaaS but it does include a server so if you keep you ebooks centrally located and acess them from there, your bookmarks and notes would be preserved.

https://calibre-ebook.com/about

m_kos• 6 years ago

@JoeDaDude

Sorry for OT, but there are no PMs on hacker news. I found your comment about CO2 sensors for Raspberry PI from last year [0]. Have you finished this project? If yes, could you share a few details?

For my first Rasberry PI project, I am considering buying Enviro for Raspberry Pi + Air Quality. I would like to add an affordable CO2 sensor that would require minimal config and no soldering. Pimoroni folks told me MH-Z19 would not work because of the number of pins. Would you have any suggestions on what sensor to choose and how to make it work with Enviro / Raspberry PI?

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20185649

wegs2• 6 years ago

Can I pay anyone for a hosted Calibre server?

xbmcuser2• 6 years ago

https://github.com/koreader/koreader and you can host your own koreader server to sync data https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server

bartvk• 6 years ago

Wonderful. It even supports dark mode. If you want to try and install it under macOS, simply type:

  $ brew cask install sigil

If you don't have homebrew installed, go to http://brew.sh

Sigil – A free, open-source, multi-platform eBook editor

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