Sigil is free,

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

editing software for

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

in the

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

format. As a

cross-platform Within 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 platform, computing platforms. Some ...

application, Sigil is distributed for the

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

platforms under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

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

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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 lim ...

files. A companion application, PageEdit, allows

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

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 that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two ''code units''. UTF-16 arose from an earli ...

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

Table of contents A table of contents (or simply contents, abbreviated as TOC), is a list usually part of the Book design#Front matter, front matter preceding the main text of a book or other written work containing the titles of the text's sections, sometimes with ...

generator with multi-level heading support *

Metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

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 backwa ...

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 d ...

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 match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

(

PCRE Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) is a library written in C, which implements a regular expression engine, inspired by the capabilities of the Perl programming language. Philip Hazel started writing PCRE in summer 1997. PCRE's synta ...

) 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 connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

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, 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