For good and for bad, the paper books sales and
consumption is on sharp decline, since more and more people switch to reading
content digitally.
You may have already enjoyed the epublishing revolution as
consumer, using different ebook readers, tables, or big-screen smartphones,
betraying your home library. However, have you thought to join the revolution
as content creator? Why not? You do not need to spend your financial resources
anymore to publish your books. Fast, easy, does not require special knowledge
and expertise.
And here, I would like to present the smart, free, and
user-friendly assistant, which will help you to convert your novel in any text
format to the special ebook format EPUB. Sigil is a multi-platform EPUB ebook
editor, developed by Strahinja Markovic, and currently appearing on the top of
the most popular open-source applications’ lists. This open-source tool takes a
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach
to putting together your finished manuscript, and comes with all the basic
formatting tools you need.
Just import your finished text into EPUB as plain text
and you’re ready to go. A WYSIWYG editor lets you edit e-books in something as
close as possible to their final form, which greatly improves not only editing
accuracy but also the appearance and presentation of the text. It's critical
for readability in both traditional and electronic publishing formats.
Your work is divided up into separate XHTML-based
chapters, and by styling up your text using headings you can generate a full
table of contents with a single click, allowing your readers to jump around
your work quickly and easily. You can even insert images into the text,
including your book’s own cover. Make sure it’s 590 pixels wide by 750 high, and
then place it at the beginning of your document and insert a chapter break
immediately after it and before your text. Finish by expanding the Images
section of the Book Browser pane, then right-click your cover image and choose
Add Semantics > Cover Image.
Sigil also features a tool that will check your EPUB file
for errors – click the green tick to verify it’s problem-free before
distributing it.
Main Features
- Free and
open source software under GPLv3
- Multi-platform:
runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
- Full
UTF-16 support
- Full EPUB
2 spec support
- Multiple
Views: Book View, Code View and Preview View
- WYSIWYG
editing in Book View
- Complete
control over directly editing EPUB syntax in Code View
- Table of
Contents generator with multi-level heading support
- Metadata
editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200)
with full descriptions for each
- User
interface translated into many languages
- Spell
checking with default and user configurable dictionaries
- Full Regular
Expression (PCRE) support for Find & Replace
- Supports
import of EPUB and HTML files, images, and style sheets,
- Documents
can be validated for EPUB compliance with the integrated FlightCrew EPUB
validator
- Embedded HTML
Tidy: all imported files have their formatting corrected, and your editing
can be optionally cleaned
Screenshots
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