The fundamental problem with PDF files is that they do not contain things like paragraphs, lines, or even words. They simply have drawing command for placing individual letters at certain coordinates on the page. A conversion program can attempt to "reconstruct" the text from that, but it's a damned difficult job.

The best way to "convert" PDFs is often to print them and OCR the printed output.

Installing Sigil

I am one of these ugly pesky Linux Ubuntu jaunty users who failed in his "trivial" task. But I will not trouble you with my problems. :D

My guess is just that the percentage of your Linux users will very probably soon drop from 9% to much less. So, don't bother about it...:rolleyes:

I wish you good luck.

Feel free to trouble me with your problems, I will be glad to help. I never said I wouldn't be. If the build process can be improved / streamlined / simplified in any way, I will do my best to do that.

Again, if you have some specific problem with building Sigil, I'd be happy to help... but you will have to provide more information than just "I failed".

Excuse me, but when exactly did I say I didn't care about my Linux users? The entire build system was simplified for them specifically. The install target is also present only on Linux systems.

If what you are complaining about is the lack of packaged binaries, then I'm sorry, but I do not have the time, resources or even the desire to package 10 - 15 different versions for all possible package managers, distros and architectures.

The practice of providing installers for Windows, DMG's for Mac and source archives for Linux is very widespread. I'll just name a few of the major applications, ok?

Inkscape, GIMP, Wireshark... Hell, even GCC. All of these are provided for Linux in source form only, and are provided as packages by your distribution's package maintainers, not by the developers. And they are all applications with years of history and tens if not hundereds of developers behind them.

There are many, many more examples. So spare me the sarcasm.

Sorry. Sarcasm spared. Thanks for your reply.

hi roger,
i'm very sorry you're having trouble installing sigil, but let's not forget that valloric is spending unbelievable amounts of his own free time and effort to make a brilliant application for us for free. that is an incredibly generous initiative and i think it's worth a bit of appreciation and understanding, and maybe trying to meet him halfway so that he can spend more time making big improvements to sigil which will benefit everyone.

not only is he making the extra effort to make sigil cross-plateform (not a negligeable task !), he has already said he is more than willing to try to talk you through the installation process on linux. in addition there are several linux users here who have apparently managed to install it without trouble, and i'm sure they'd also be more than willing to help you if you give more information about your problem (like the precise disto you're using, etc.).

in any case i think valloric is to be applauded, and perhaps we can try to keep the appreciation to snark ratio a little more reasonable when posting here. it seems like the least we can do, under the circumstances.

In a computer where I don't have recent enough Qt libraries, I was able to compile and run Sigil in this way:

1. Download and compile the latest Qt libraries. No need to actually install them, but then I used "./configure -prefix .", so that qmake would use the libraries from that directory, and not the system installed ones.

2. Dowload the binary cmake

3. Download the Sigil sources. Now I have under a single directory, these subdirectories:
qt-x11-opensource-src-4.5.2, cmake-2.6.4-Linux-i386, Sigil_code_0.1.2

4. Switch into Sigil_code_0.1.2 and run:
(that's to make it pick the "right" Qt libraries and binaries).

5. Run make.

6. If I didn't miss anything, now I have a working sigil binary under Sigil_code_0.1.2/bin.

I'd just like to mention that this is a very unconventional way of building Sigil. As Jellby said, he has to jump through hoops a bit because he uses an old system with old Qt libraries.

On any modern distro this process is greatly simplified. Detailed instructions are in the source package and on the website.

Usually it boils down to this:
That's it. Four lines in terminal. 10 seconds of work.

Okay, it builds fine in Ubuntu Jaunty. My problem was that I was running Intrepid and the latest versions in the repository were not the latest versions available.

I'm glad you got it all sorted out.

I can be an imbecile sometimes. I should have figured it out last night. I've gotten too dependent on the package manager. It's been a long time since I've tried to build someone else's code.

It looks very nice. Great work, I've got a small project I can test it with and I'll do that this evening. Thanks!

Hopefully the package maintainers will pick up on it soon. There's already a package on MacPorts.

@Valloric

Sorry for giving you trouble.

Thank you for providing this evening the name of the last two libraries that i did not have installed. After adding them, compilation went smoothly on Ubuntu jaunty 32 bits.

I replaced the last command (sudo make install), by sudo checkinstall to get a deb to be able to do a clean uninstall if needed, or allow a future smooth upgrade.

I hope to be able soon to provide you with comments on the use of your software.

Thanks (and karma ) for providing a tool which will be of the greatest use to a PRS-505 owner.:thanks::)

Now I can't help but ask: why didn't you read the building instructions before trying to build Sigil from source? The lines I provided in my previous post are present both in the INSTALL.txt file that is provided in the source distribution (in the archive and in the repository, and is also explicitly referenced in the README.txt file) and on the Sigil website as a wiki page linked to directly from the home page of Sigil (in two places I believe).

So all of your build problems stemmed from the fact that you didn't read the very specific and easy to follow instructions, that you flat-out can't miss.

You are free to do so, but this is rather unnecessary. Making a deb with checkinstall is useful when the install process puts many different files in many different places. Sigil's install process installs only one file: "sigil", which is placed in /usr/local/bin (this path can be changed, see the build instructions for more info).

You're right.

I just read the google code page here which is the first hit when you type on google "sigil install linux". I thought it was enough. Maybe, it could also be completed with libqt4-dev.
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/wiki/...onInstructions