Month: August 2011

Sigil User Study

Posted on August 31, 2011

Introduction Since taking over as the maintainer of Sigil I have spent some time reaching out to specific people in the ebook community to ask them about Sigil. Specifically if they use Sigil? Why or why not? What do they see as Sigil’s shortcomings? How do they use Sigil... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Markdown, Textile and calibre

Posted on August 30, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such... Continue reading

Sigil 0.4.1 Released

Posted on August 26, 2011

Sigil 0.4.1 is complete and available. This is mainly a maintenance release and fixes a number of bugs. There are a few new features mostly around the code view. As always see the changelog for a complete list of changes. Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Calibre as a First Step

Posted on August 23, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Calibre’s robust conversion engine can be leveraged to help with formatting tasks. Converting with calibre helps when you are dealing with a format you cannot easily edit, or a format you aren’t very familiar. It’s also helpful in situations where the insides of the file... Continue reading

Nook Covers Not Showing Up

Posted on August 21, 2011

The Barnes and Noble (B&N) Nook has issues reading covers for EPUB files. Not all Nooks have this issue it’s only the Color and Touch because the original Nook supported reading the cover from an external image file. The Color and Touch will only read covers from the EPUB files... Continue reading

Sigil SCM Move to Git Completed Sucessfully

Posted on August 20, 2011

Last night I moved Sigil’s SCM from Mercurial (hg) to Git (git). The change was completed successfully and without any issues. 0.4.0 had locations for things like the user manual pointing to the git locations. These are now live and working again. These links are now broken in... Continue reading

Calibre and HamsterSoft Conclusion

Posted on August 18, 2011

Previously I posted about an instance of copyright infringement. It was found that a company called HamsterSoft was using portions of calibre in their proprietary and closed source ebook conversion program. The good news is the situation has been resolved. On August 15th I was contacted by Pavel, one... Continue reading

Formatting Tip: Poetry

Posted on August 16, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Poetry is one of the hardest elements to get right when formatting an ebook. The biggest issue is poems visually use a fixed width. Each line needs to be easily distinguishable. If they run together the rhyming and meter can easily be thrown off. Ebooks typically... Continue reading

Sigil 0.4.0 and FlightCrew 0.7.2 Released

Posted on August 15, 2011

The long awaited Sigil 0.4.0 release is now out. Along with Sigil is a new release of FlightCrew. FlightCrew version 0.7.2 is the latest version bundled with Sigil. If you’re an OS X user then one thing need to be aware of is these two releases bump the... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Scene Breaks

Posted on August 9, 2011

About Formatting Tips. There are two types of scene breaks: hard and soft. Hard scene breaks are denoted by a visual separator between paragraphs. Typical identifiers are lines and stars. Soft scene breaks are created by putting white space between paragraphs. They both serve the same purpose but some... Continue reading

Sigil Donation Change

Posted on August 6, 2011

I’ve updated the donation links they now point to my PayPal account. Going forward donations will be directed toward me instead of Strahinja. This is something we had talked about and planned. I just want to warn people who have donated before because you will see a different email address... Continue reading

Thinking of Changing Sigil's SCM

Posted on August 2, 2011

Right now Sigil is using the Mercurial SCM (source control management). I’m thinking of switching to Git. Since taking over Sigil I have had one person contributing and he is okay with the change. I’m not looking to change simply for the sake of changing. Before Sigil I... Continue reading

Windows Acquired

Posted on August 2, 2011

Thanks to a Sigil user (Bryan) I now have in hand a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Thanks Bryan for sending me a copy of Windows! The plan is to get RC 2 builds out this weekend. Continue reading

Formatting Tip: Big First Letter

Posted on August 2, 2011

About Formatting Tips. A common embellishment used in print books is to have the first letter of the first paragraph in a chapter appear much larger then the others. In addition to the letter being larger than the rest it also falls below the baseline. The rest of the... Continue reading