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FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions for Sigil
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0.5.3 does not run on Ubuntu 12.04Try removing the /opt/sigil/libQt files (make a copy first). Otherwise you may need to wait until a new version is eventually released - but Linux binaries are not officially supported. GeneralIs there some kind of Sigil User's Guide?Yes! (okay, it needs some updating to cover all the latest features, but it contains lots of useful information). Can I write my book using Sigil?Well, sure, you could, but Sigil is primarily an editing program for books that have already been written in one of the many word processors out there. You are probably better off writing your book in your favourite editor, exporting it to html, and then using Sigil to format it for EPUB. But if you really want to write it and edit it in Sigil, then it will still support you brilliantly. Can Sigil support Text, RTF, FB2, Mobi, KF8 or other formats?Sigil is an EPUB editor. It can open EPUB files and import html files, but all other formats need to be converted to html first before importing. There are a lot of formats out there, and converting from one format to another is not a trivial issue. Since there are already excellent tools for converting from one format to another (namely calibre), Sigil will remain focused on being the best EPUB editor available. If you do add files to your ebook in Sigil, they will be placed - without conversion - into the Misc folder unless they are html, image, css, or font files. Can Sigil support an inline Table of Contents for Kindles?EPUB uses a file called toc.ncx to store its Table of Contents information. Unfortunately the Mobi format on Kindle requires you to also use an HTML file (marked as as TOC) with the table of contents in html format - usually called an Inline TOC. (The Kindle also uses the toc.ncx but only to allow you to navigate from chapter to chapter and show chapter markings on the progress line. The inline TOC is needed to view the Table of Contents). You can use calibre to convert from EPUB to Mobi format and calibre will automatically convert the EPUB table of contents toc.nx to an inline TOC html file that the Kindle requires. If you use Kindlegen, then the table of contents will not be converted automatically, so you really should use calibre. Its possible a future version may include this feature but there are no immediate plans for it. I heard that Replace can crash Sigil or lose data?Unfortunately, the current editors in Sigil cannot properly handle certain Replace actions (and some Find actions in Book View). This is being worked on for the next version of Sigil since they cannot be fixed in the current code. This will require a rewrite of some core components of the code and will take some time. In the meantime there are things to be aware of. Replace will now (as of 0.5.1) only work in Code View. So all Replacing and Counting will automatically switch you to Code View before executing. If you replace in the Current File, and your file is very large (probably larger than many ereaders can handle), and your find and replace text will cause a lot of replacements, Sigil will crash due to a bug in the Qt editor that is used to display/edit your text. You should split up your files to more manageable sizes for now, or use Look: Selected HTML Files and select 1 (or more) files to do the replace. If you replace in All or Selected Files, and you replace something within the xml declaration (like a ") then, since Sigil will try to auto-correct the code in your files, you will have data loss. If you mess up the html badly, then you've got problems. A future version will stop the attempt to auto-correct to avoid data-loss. Is Sigil free?Yes! Its completely free to use and fully open-source, just like the EPUB specification. If you feel like you want to Donate to show your support, then your contribution will be greatly appreciated. Questions/BugsWhere can I ask questions about Sigil?If you have any questions about Sigil not covered here or in the manual, visit the Sigil Forum at MobileRead. Where can I report bugs or feature requests?See Reporting Issues. What is being worked on now?See the Changelog for what's in the latest release. Or see the Issue Log for all issues/requests. What are all these stars in the issue tracker?The stars are way of voting for issues you care about. Just click on the blue outline of the star until it's filled with yellow (you need to have a Google account). Now the issue has become more prominent, and issues issues with more stars may be fixed/implemented sooner. You will also get email alerts when the issue changes (this can be turned off on a per-issue level). Installing SigilWhere do I download Sigil from?Go to the Sigil home page and use choose your file from Downloads list on the left. See the Sigil Installation Instructions for more details. Sigil does not start - 32 vs 64 bitIf you are running a 32 bit OS make sure you download the 32bit version of Sigil and not the 64bit version - see the Sigil Installation Instructions for more information. Sigil does not start - entry point/dll/uninstallIn order to avoid issues with DLL and library conflicts, its best to uninstall the previous version of Sigil before installing a new one. Sigil does not start - Linux with libaudio warningOn some Linux installations, it seems libaudio is needed. You can test this by running /opt/sigil/sigil.sh from the command line and see if you get a warning about this. If you do, then try installing nas-libs on Ubuntu or the libaudio2 package. Sigil does not start - MAC OS 10.5Sigil on the MAC requires MAC OS 10.6 or later. Sigil does not start - Linux with "GLIBCXX_3.4.11 not found" messageYour system's version of the C++ standard library is too old to use the Sigil binaries in the installer. You have several options available:
Sigil does not start - 'illegal hardware instruction' errorSigil requires that your CPU supports SSE2. All CPU's made after ~2003 support it. Using SigilWhat is Code View?EPUB documents are formatted using a subset of HTML commands to define how plain text should look. Book View shows you what your book should look like to most readers. The Code View shows you the raw HTML formatting commands. It is possible to edit using Book View for WYSIWYG editing, but if you want more control over your document you will find that its best to use Code View for editing. When using Book View, Sigil has to guess at how to apply the formatting you select and may not always do it the way you want. Code View gives you complete control over the formatting. In fact, Spell Check and searching across files is only possible in Code View. This is because Code View is much easier to manage in the program - the Book View is always only an approximation of your text. What is Regex?Sigil's Find and Replace tool can search for plain text or for Regex patterns. Regex stands for Regular Expression and means that you can search for patterns of text in your document instead of just specific words. Regex is very powerful and can become very complicated, but you do not need to use all the functionality when first starting to use it. If you've used Sigil before, the Regex syntax has changed slightly to the standard PCRE engine (since version 0.5.0). You can find more details at these links (and ask for help in the Sigil forum):
Regex Tips
Spell Check - not working/always on?Spell Check is run automatically in Code View and underlines all mis-spelled words in red. Spell Check does not run in Book View yet, and there is no separate list of all mis-spelled words at the moment. Select "None" to turn off Spell Checking under Edit->Preferences->Spell Check. Spell Check - missing my favourite dictionaryIn order to keep the size of the download smaller and to limit the number of places that require checking for updated dictionaries, only a few dictionaries are included by default. But the good news is that you can easily install your own dictionary. It must be Hunspell and unicode compatible, and for now you have to copy your dictionaries to Sigil's directory.
There are other sites with dictionaries. For example, to install the GB dictionary from Libre Office, you can go directly to their extension site Libre Office Extensions - American-British-Canadian dictionaries and choose one of the dictionaries to download. Once downloaded, extract the files and install as above. Spell Check - doesn't handle quotes/dashes/etc correctlyIf you install your own dictionary and it isn't recognizing curly quotes, em-dashes, etc. then you may need additional hyphenation dictionary files. See the previous question. I opened my book in Sigil and all I see is the first page?There is a Book Browser pane to the left of your screen. There is a Text folder inside it. Expand the folder, and you can see the XHTML files that make up your book. An EPUB file consists of several XHTML documents. Customarily, one is created per book chapter, but it can be done differently. Now you may be wondering, why should readers of an EPUB have to jump from one XHTML file to the next? Why can't they just see the book as one text "flow"? The answer is that they do. The readers are not aware that an EPUB file is an archive of several different files since their Reading System always displays everything in it as one text flow. Even when every chapter is actually a separate file, when the user pages through their book, they see one chapter ending, and on the next page, the next chapter starting. They are never aware that their Reading System has actually transitioned them from one file to the next. You may be surprised, but Microsoft Word's new DOCX format is also several marked-up files inside a ZIP archive. And yet you see it as "one" document. More information can be found in the manual. I pasted some richly formatted text into Sigil but it's only pasted as plain text?Don't paste rich text directly into Sigil. It doesn't work as well as it should, since Webkit takes over this functionality and it's hard to go around it. Instead, export (or convert) you text to HTML and then import that directly (. This will preserve all formatting. Why do some of my non-ASCII characters appear correctly in Sigil, but show up as question marks on my Reader or in Adobe Digital Editions?ADE doesn't perform font substitution. A mobile version of ADE's engine is also used on the Sony Readers and the vast majority of other portable reading devices that can display EPUB books. So unfortunately all of these devices inherit ADE's shortcomings. In Sigil, if the font you are using does not have the required glyphs to render a character present in the text, glyphs from a different font that can render it are used. This is called font substitution. So as long as some fonts on your computer can display these characters, so can Sigil. ADE on the other hand only displays a small subset of Unicode characters by default. The supported characters are listed in the Adobe PDF Reference v1.7, Appendix D, tables D.1 and D.3. If you want other characters than these to display in ADE, you will have to embed the required fonts. Sigil currently doesn't have official support for font embedding due to a bug in the Qt framework. This will hopefully be solved in time. But ADE randomly displays question marks inside wordsThis is because your original file has soft hyphens. ADE doesn't handle those. So just remove these soft hyphens from your file and the question marks will go away. Look for something like ­ or ‑. Basically anything "strange" that exists between those two characters. But you have to look in the HTML. When I open the "Add metadata property" window in the Meta Editor, some descriptions don't "fit" on the screenDo you see the dividing bar between the list of properties and the metadata description? Put your mouse over it. Notice the cursor change: you can adjust the amount of space the description takes up, thereby "revealing" the rest of the text if it doesn't fit. During Sigil's initial development, this description area used to automatically adjust to the size of the text that needs to be displayed. But this proved to be highly annoying when the user scrolled through the list using the cursor keys since some descriptions are very short, and other very large. The description area would flash up and down like crazy. You wouldn't believe how annoying it is until you've seen it. What does SGC mean in my document?SGC just indicates a SiGil Class that is used by Sigil for formatting information. EPUBWhere can I ask questions about EPUB?The manual contains an introduction to EPUB, but you can also visit the EPUB Forum at MobileRead. How do I add blank line?You will need to insert <br /> or an empty paragraph <p></p> since carriage-returns/newlines are ignored by EPUB. You may even need to use <div> <br /> <br /></div> for multiple blank lines since some EPUB readers ignore the spacing. How can I use an image for a Chapter heading, and have it show up correctly in the Table of Contents?You can put anything between the heading tags to make Sigil link to it in the NCX (the EPUB file responsible for the TOC), and set the "title" attribute on the <h#> element to get the text. So it would look like this: <h1 title="CHAPTER 1"><img ... ></h1> The TOC would link to that heading element (and by extension, the images inside it) and the TOC entry would say "CHAPTER 1". You can even use heading tags with no text in your document if you just want a Chapter entry: <h2 title="Chapter Subsection"></h2> How do I add margins to the text?Add this to the bottom of the CSS code (the yellow color text in the Code View). The values are of course completely arbitrary: @page {
margin-left: 5%;
margin-right: 5%;
}That will give you left and right margins. Look here for more details on CSS margins. How do I remove the white space between the paragraphs?To remove the white space between the paragraphs, add this to the bottom of the CSS code (the yellow color text in the Code View): p {margin: 0; padding: 0;}This will affect only the paragraph spacing. To remove all the whitespace between the various elements and make the document look more "book like", use this code: body, div, p, h1, h2, h3, h4 { margin: 0; padding: 0; }How do I add a "drop cap"?There are several ways to do a drop cap. If you book is formatted just right, it can be done just with CSS. In Sigil Book View, go to the paragraph you want to have a drop cap. Now switch to Code View. Find the paragraph and add the following around the first letter of the paragraph, in this example, an H. <span class="dropcap">H</span> Now look up at the top of the file in code view. Find the lines that say <style type="text/css"> /*<![CDATA[*/ and immediately after them add the following span.dropcap { float: left; font-size: 4.7em; line-height: 0.8em; margin-right: 3pt; margin-bottom: -0.1em; }Switch back to Book View. Done! Add the <span class="dropcap"></span> to all the letters at the start of paragraphs where you want a drop cap. You might need to tweak the values for font-size, line-height and margin-bottom to get the effect you want. Sigil's Book View may not show exactly how it'll appear in ADE, but it's pretty close. Posting Comments/Questions Please use the Sigil Forum at MobileRead for all questions/comments. Comments on this wiki will be removed. |
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