0.7.700 Alpha Ready For Testing

[user_none]

KevinH has been hard at work with keeping Sigil alive. So much so that we're gearing up for a new major (0.8.0 release). Oh and so I don't forget DiapDealer has been helping out too.

Right now we need testing and feedback on the major new feature we've implemented... The official plugin system!

So far we have the base concept in place but we need feedback about the design and system. The idea is you can do input, output, and edit operations via plugins written in a variety of scripting languages. Right now Python 2.7 is supported. Lua 5.2 has preliminary support in Sigil but it's not complete yet. Python 3 is planned before 0.8.0.

Packages are available removed. They're not on Google Code because new downloads are disabled. Since this is an alpha I don't want to put them on GitHub. When 0.8.0 is released it will be on GitHub.

I'll let KevinH provide more details.

Moderator Notice

Closed due to 0.8.0 Release.

[theducks]

C:programfiles/Sigil.exe is not a valid windows application

Win XP SP3
Uninstalled, reinstalled previous version. It runs

[eschwartz]

Happy rebirth-day, Sigil! It is good to see that calibre still has competition, and more importantly that the one editor to support WYSIWYG editing shows no sign of falling by the wayside while the ebook world (eventually) moves on.

KevinH, DiapDealer and user_none for all your hard work!

[KevinH]

Hi All,

As user-none said in his post we have been working on getting some fixes into Sigil and adding support for python 2.7 plugins, Lua plugins, and planned support for Python 3 (hopefully soon) plugins.

This alpha release also includes fixes for saving selected html entities, changes in Code View editing to replace strike tags (now deprecated) with del tags, and a bug fix to properly identify svg image tags as inline, single style tags.

As user-none said, we are looking for feedback and ideas on the plugin system we have added to Sigil.

To help plugin authors get started adding their own input, output, and edit plugins, we have thrown together some brief documentation on how the plugin system works (and I am a horrible ebook editor so improvements to the documentation are welcomed!), and created a simple testme.zip plugin that demonstrates many features of the edit plugin interface.

I have attached the documentation and the testme.zip plugin to this post.

(Please note, plugins for Sigil are zip archives and so to add the testme.zip plugin to Sigil, do not unzip it first.)

The key difference with Sigil plugins is that Sigil can use any Python 2.7 interpreter already on your computer. Most Linux and Mac OS X Mavericks users will already have Python 2.7 installed. For Windows users we recommended ActiveState's Active Python 2.7.X Community edition which can be downloaded for free and easily installed.

So we are looking for volunteers to download this new alpha release and try playing around with the Python 2.7 plugins and provide feedback so that we can refine and improve the support for Plugins in Sigil.

Hopefully, DiapDealer will post his experimental port of the KindleUnpack plugin to Sigil in this issue for you to play with as well. With his Sigil plugin, you can import .mobi ebooks directly into Sigil for editing. A future plugin already planned is to add output plugin that passes its contents directly to kindlegen for creating mobis as well.

If anyone has any questions about how to use or write your own Sigil python plugin, I would be happy to provide what help I can.

Please let us know what you think about Sigil's new plugin system and how it can be improved.

Once plugins are in place, future plans for Sigil include adding as much epub 3.0 support as we can given the currently available support in WebKit that is part of Qt 5.3.1. This will come in small steps after we have plugin support fully implemented and released

Thanks,

KevinH

[KevinH]

Hi theducks,

user-none did all of the latest builds. I know he updated the entire Sigil tree to work with VS 2013 compiler on Windows to get the most recent build. He should be able tell us what the minimum system requirements are for the Windows build. Unfortunately, I am not a Windows person at all (longtime Linux and Mac OS X user) so I can't give much help here. I know DiapDelaer also has a Windows build and he may be able to help as well.

Thanks,

KevinH

Originally Posted by theducks

Crogramfiles/Sigil.exe is not a valid windows application

Win XP SP3
Uninstalled, reinstalled previous version. It runs

[theducks]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Hi theducks,

user-none did all of the latest builds. I know he updated the entire Sigil tree to work with VS 2013 compiler on Windows to get the most recent build. He should be able tell us what the minimum system requirements are for the Windows build. Unfortunately, I am not a Windows person at all (longtime Linux and Mac OS X user) so I can't give much help here. I know DiapDelaer also has a Windows build and he may be able to help as well.

Thanks,

KevinH

The installer may need to be tweaked to reject XP up front rather than letting it fail on launch..
BTW I did reboot as the 2013 C++ runtime was part of the package.

[KevinH]

Hi theducks,
Some google searching leads me to believe that some simple changes to VS 2013 C++ projects will allow them to run on XP and I passed that info along to user-none, so stay-tuned and we may have something that will work for XP soon.

Take care,

KevinH

Originally Posted by theducks

The installer may need to be tweaked to reject XP up front rather than letting it fail on launch..
BTW I did reboot as the 2013 C++ runtime was part of the package.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by theducks

Crogramfiles/Sigil.exe is not a valid windows application

I did a test install on my old 32-bit XP netbook and got the same error message.

The 64-bit version installed fine on my other machine.

[canpolat]

This is great news. Thank you all for keeping Sigil alive. I think the plugin system is a good way for attracting attention from developers. I couldn't see any alpha builds for Linux, so for now, I'll stay tuned...

[DiapDealer]

I'll try to get some binary deb packages ready later today. Linux users can still build Sigil from source if they want to test the new features, too.

[user_none]

XP is not supported and there are no plans to do so. It was EOL by the manufacturer and Sigil has never supported EOL versions of an OS. Also, there is the Qt 5 issues that caused on XP calibre to disable installation and support of that we'd run into too.

I should also mention that OS X 10.9+ is required.

[DiapDealer]

Attaching my KindleInput plugin to get the ball rolling. It only works for KF8 kindlebooks right now. The older mobi-only formats won't be able to be imported (yet). Maybe it might give others some ideas.

Mac and Windows users should probably already have tkinter installed with their Python. Some Linux flavors don't come with tkinter by default. It can easily be installed with "sudo apt-get install python-tk" (or similar).

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Attaching my KindleInput plugin to get the ball rolling.

I've tested it on a Windows 8 machine with a couple of KindleGen generated books and didn't have any problems, however, I always got a couple of pathof warnings at the end:

Warning: pathof expects utf-8 encoded byestring:  C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp\Sigil\scratchpad\41ee34d8-0d6c-4fb6-8c34-4d1056dd7577\new.epub

You can test this behavior with this simple azw3 book that I uploaded to the MR Library.

[KevinH]

Hi Doitsu,

You can safely ignore those warnings. KindleUnpack was designed to work solely with utf-8 encoded bytestrings and to convert the required paths on Windows only to full unicode only exactly as needed. The python launcher that Sigil uses was designed in much the same way (always use utf-8 encoded bytestrings) to prevent issues with python when full unicode and bytestring data are concatenated causing improper implicit conversions.

The KindleImport plugin was borrowed from the Calibre KindleUnpack which defaults to using a full unicode environment even on Python 2.7. So it works with full unicode and not utf-8 strings.

That warning message is basically either something in the Sigil plugin launcher code or kindleunpack code saying that pathof() always wants to be passed in a utf-8 string which for windows will be properly converted to full unicode (and remain as a bytestring for Mac OS X and Linux), but for some reason it was given a full unicode string instead.

It should not hurt anything. I will try to track down where the full unicode python 2.7 strings are coming from and convert them all to utf-8. Alternatively, I could always redesign the Sigil plugin code to always use full unicode.

Thanks for the heads up.

Kevin

[DiapDealer]

Hey Kevin, the full unicode strings are probably coming from me using the "from __future__ import unicode_literals" (or whatever) in my code. But it works in the calibre plugin without warning, so I'm not sure. I've not gotten that particular warning in my preliminary testing so far (mostly on Linux--a little Windows).