Daily Archives: Tuesday, October 7, 2014

  • New version of Sigil epub editor released

    In February this year John Schember announced the end of the Sigil free e-book editor on the Sigil project website due to time pressures. However, now there is a new release which is due to the contribution of developer Kevin Hendrick. In addition to some bug fixes and minor improvements, Sigil 0.8.0 mainly provides plug-in support.

    Sigil screenshot
    Sigil screenshot. Click on image for full-sized version

    Like its predecessor Sigil 0.8.0 is open source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3. Nevertheless, the plug-in system was written in a way that allows plug-ins to be released under any licence their author wants and must not necessarily be open source. Plug-ins are called upon with the aid of a plug-in launchers which is itself covered by a BSD licence. The plug-ins themselves remain independent and could also be used by other applications. The new plug-in API is similar to that of Calibre, so that some Calibre plug-ins can be used with only minor changes. John Schember’s blog provides comprehensive details of the release announcement.

    The new version of Sigil is available for download on the project’s Github page as source code, as well as for Windows and Mac OS. For Linux distros, the current release is already available for Arch Linux in the community repository, whilst for Fedora it is in testing. There are also packages for Ubuntu in various unofficial Launchpad repositories.