Sigil-1.0.0 represents a major milestone in Sigil’s history. The requirement that all epubs must be restructured to meet Sigil’s long-held standard has finally been lifted. Users can still manually choose to restructure epubs to the old Sigil standards if they choose, but it will no longer be done automatically upon opening. Please read the following notes carefully to avoid confusion.
The major changes since Sigil-0.9.18 include the following:
- Upon initial load, the epub structure that exists will be loaded and kept in its “as-is” state, moving and renaming nothing
- The BookBrowser will still show the Text, Images, Styles, Fonts, Audio, Video, and Misc “folders” but these are now “virtual folders” that simply organize the existing resources by type but do not restrict their actual location within the epub.
- A new Preferences setting has been added to the Appearance Preferences that will determine if the book folder relative path will be shown in the BookBrowser or its shorter unique name (filename) will be used instead. In either case, the BookBrowser tooltips will always show the file’s true book folder relative path. Duplicate file names (in different subfolders) will always show the longer path to be able to differentiate between them regardless of the new Appearance Preference.
- A Tools menu item has been added to standardize any epub already loaded to Sigil’s old structure
- A Tools menu item has been added to allow a user to design a custom “empty” epub layout
- A “Move” context menu item has been added to BookBrowser to enable moving of resources to where you want them to be.
- A “Rename” context menu item has been added to BookBrowser to enable renaming of the NCX and OPF resources.
- The python plugin interface has been extended to support all of this as documented in the new Sigil_Plugin_Framework_rev12.epub and online at MobileRead in our Plugin Development thread.
Please note, the design goal of Sigil 1.0.0 was to make minimal changes for users and ebook developers that still want to use Sigil as they did. The new Preference setting defaults to showing only the filename as before, and the default empty epub for creating new epubs is the same as before. The interface and functionality should stay almost exactly the same. Loading any epub previously saved by Sigil will still work exactly as before. Only editing new epubs that are in non-standard form will necessitate a use of the new Tool menu (see the fourth item above) to standardize it.
Bug Fixes (since the 0.9.991 Pre-release):
- All bugs reported in alpha release have been fixed.
Special thanks to Vroni, BeckyEBook, Doitsu, Odamizu,
Un_Pogaz, snarkophilus, and many others who ran tests and reported bugs. - Fix for crash on macOS opening Preferences following New MainWindow
- Workaround Qt bug in restoreState after maximize with Find and Replace open
- Fix logic to identify and store window geometry when normal (not maximized)
- Fix handling of plugin dialog being closed or aborted / cancelled
- Prevent Preview timer related crashes on closing MainWindow on macOS
- Update and harden media types recognition
- Use non-native QFileDialogs on macOS to workaround Qt bugs
- Fix crash of fast Tab closing on all platforms
- Prevent whitespace inside code tags from being changed when prettifying
- replace case change “text icon” with actual sizable icon (Thank you BeckyEbook)
New Features (since the 0.9.991 Pre-release):
- Add Load/Save capability for the Custom Empty Epub Layout Designer
- Large speedups in Reports using QtConcurrent
- Speedups in Spellcheck Dialog sorting
- Add File Name to Preview Window title
- Add Regular Expression File Renamer to BookBrowser context menu
- Mend on Open or Save only touch/repair non-wellformed files
- Re-enable Drag and Drop of Tabs
- Add menus/icons for “New ePub2” and “New ePub3” to ease creation of empty epubs (icons courtesy of BeckyEbook)
- Extend ePub2 Guide Semantics to include many of the “other.*” codes common to ePub3 as well
Please check the Sigil Wiki for important Sigil support links, additional resource downloads, and platform-specific trouble-shooting tips/requirements.
Mac users should still download and install ActiveState’s ActiveTcl Community Edition to utilize plugins that use Tk/Tcl GUIs. More here.
Mac users should also check out the wiki entry on the New Release File Format
The latest Sigil user guide can always be downloaded from its own repository.