Sigil Ebook

[Heather Mitchell]

Iam trying to find my workflow for using Scrivener with Sigil (or Caliber Epub Editor) as post-processing for a rather technical e-book. As some people here seem to use that as well, I would like to hear your recommendations and practical tips with regard to the following questions:

I am planning to use Scrivener styles extensively for some special paragraph and character formats and also probably some special markdown. Still experimenting with those. Any hints here highly appreciated.

I would definitely break a large single file into several chapters - it improves user experience with faster loading in the ebook reader. On occasion I have found chapters split into smaller fragments and that too is easily corrected in Sigil.

Thank you @philjaq! I highly appreciate your detailed description and think that I might finally end up with a similar workflow. Too bad that this intermediate step through LibreOffice is necessary for layout purposes. I had hoped that Scrivener was the all-in-solution. Perhaps it will get there over the years.

If you want to use Scrivener like a programmer would, where you can compile and get straight to the end product, you need to compile to something other than what is intended for a different part of the publication process entirely.

My concern is whether the investment in time will pay off later in an improved workflow. At present, it is not onerous to do the page layout in a word-processor because my requirements do not require DTP precision. Furthermore, I have already a certain investment in Sigil (and Calibre) which means that I can handle any cleanup or reconfiguration with little effort.

After trying Calibre rather extensively, I came across an app named Sigil, which does exactly what I want: You just throw in your HTML files (it automatically imports images referenced by them) and add some metadata.

Before proceeding, you should use your favorite scripting language (or modify the attached quick-and-dirty PHP script) to remove everything but the main part of the chapter from the HTML files. (Make sure to remove any tables or divs surrounding the entire content because that might break page-by-page navigation on your ebook reader).

Even if it is your first time editing ebooks, Sigil is strait forward and easy for anyone to use. You dont need any coding experience to edit and create ebooks with Sigil. The interface is simply, with various views, including code view, book browser, validation results, and, of course, a WYSIWYG view so you can see how the end product will look.

I'm new to creating ebooks. I have mp3s and mp4s that I want to include in my epub so I started off making an epub v3. I started with using Sigil to create my file but I'm wondering if it was a mistake.

Perhaps I'm just new to all this, I hope my question isn't too opinion-based or preference orientated, but would I have had an easier time with Calibre or some other software? Will I be creating issues for myself by starting with Sigil now, if I want to switch over later?

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.

Sigil ( -ebook.com) is a free, open-source app for editing ePubs that was developed by Google. An ePub is actually a compressed file with separate folders for its contents. The compressed file can be opened, edited, and saved using Sigil.

I would like for my web browser to be able to open and browse e-books natively. E-Books are a great source of knowledge, and their markup is HTML. Over time, browsers have progressed into presenting images, styles, sound, and even PDF and video. To me it seems like a given that e-books should and could also be handled natively - especially since their markup is familiar and file size is low.

Epub is a wrapper of the HTML, css, images and other content of an e-book. What I mean is that it shouldn't be very hard for the browser to unwrap this file format. There are other popular e-book file formats that could be investigated as well, since I suspect they also are just wrappers.

Yes, these plugins exist and work with Orion, but they need you to open an EPUB you have on your computer. My opinion is that the browser should display EPUBs out of the box, just as with PDF files and images. If the Kagi crawler can do this and start crawling EPUBS as well, there will be a vast treasure of high quality information added to users.

Fun thing is, any page in this book works with Safari reader mode, but not with Orion reader mode. I also think that their implementation could serve as an inspiration for reader mode, since they dynamically format the books to columns, based on the browser window height.

carl Thanks for clarification. Can you do further research and land on the best js implementation of an epub reader that we should consider to ship with Orion? We will not have resources to further modify it, so it will need to work well out of the box.

One issue with epub.js is that it doesn't give the user any option to download the book. I think that unless or until search engines start indexing e-books, most people will want to download the files and not read them in the browser. Sure, you can always right-click to download the source file, but maybe a more apparent option could be added? Kind of like how Safari handles PDF files?

carl We can't add changing/maintaining an external js library to our workload. We can implement a js library for .epub and the community should recommend which one. I recommend asking the author to add this feature.

I've browsed through the Github repository, documentation and a lot of other places without finding anything about downloading the open book. It seems to me that this must be such a basic feature, can anybody with better programming knowledge find out if this is a feature of epub.js?

One solution if it's too much to mess with the scripts would be to have "Open e-books in browser" as a preference in Orion, thereby letting the user select desired behaviour. If it's enabled that would mean a user would have to right-click and "Save source as..." if they don't want to view the book.

Hi Vlad! What do you think about implementing epub.js as it is, to enable the opening of ebooks. Then if the community doesn't like it, you can reverse? For Desktop only, since iOS has a good built-in Books app already.

Using the native Apple books app in MacOS is problematic, because it comes with a heavy overhead, wanting to index your drive and sync everything to iCloud, when you maybe just wanted to quickly open a file. Much like Chrome for many people on Linux and Windows became the standard app for opening PDFs both online and offline, Orion could serve this function on MacOS for ebooks.

After a bunch of research it turns out that the Yandex Browser already has E-Pub reading integrated, and it works absolutely brilliantly, with a button in the URL bar (Save) to download the currently open E-Pub. So it can be done, that is evident. Their implementation seems almost ideal.,

I've been thinking about this, and I think the "Save" (or better "Download") button in the URL field is a perfect solution. This would also be great for PDF files when they are open using pdf.js, as well as images when they are open in their own tab/window. If you think about it, having to right-click an image and select "Save as" is not a very Mac-like way of working. Yandex browser is good inspiration.

I tried exporting from LaTeX to PDF, but isn't perfect because I have to zoom in-out and move around the page many times (isn't confortable like when you read a normal ebook purshased in book stores).I tried too exporting to RTF, but none of my mathematical formulas were in the output document.

Compile it with: htlatex myfile "html". Then load the resulting myfile.html in Sigil. Here I add missing metadata, split the chapters and mark the cover page image. Then save as epub and load it (via Calibre) on my reader.

If you have images in your book import them in Sigil (Insert > File, Cmd/Ctrl-I) and write the alt text. Images in Kindles should can be GIF, JPG or PNG, about 500 pixels wide and as small as possible.

There are two CSS rules I like to add to the CSS file in the ePub. The CSS file sets the style or formatting for the document. If you created an HTML Table of Contents, you should already have one. Otherwise you can right-click on the Styles folder in the Book Browser pane and Add Blank Stylesheet. In the CSS file I put the following:

As I mentioned before, there is a Validation button in Sigil (a large green checkmark at the top right) that lists out the issues. You can arrive at the problem line of the relevant file by double-clicking on the line number.

It's nice to meet you! I'd love to send you exclusive content that you can't find anywhere else on the blog, and I'll send you free ebooks and MP3s to help you with your online business as well!

Since Digital Aladore is more than a year old (see The Idea), I thought I should check in with a few of the key tools for any news. First up is Sigil Ebook editor, used for creating the various EPUB versions. As I have said many times, it is a great tool! There are a few features like the character report and auto merging html that I wish were in my everyday text editor.

After a scary period where it looked like development on Sigil might stall, I am happy to see it surge back to an active project full of interesting changes. This week version 0.9.1 was released stabilizing a host of new features moving the application towards full EPUB3 support. Also be sure to check through the Plugin Index to find many useful extensions for the editor.

Creating an editor that supports both EPUB2 and 3 is a bit complicated. As I mentioned in an earlier post, older versions of Sigil automatically correct markup and packaging to match the EPUB2 standard. To fix this issue, version 0.9.1 replaces Xerces (xml parser) and Tidy (html parser) with Python lxml and Google Gumbo, and makes the FlightCrew EPUB2 validator a plugin rather than built in tool.

3a8082e126