LinuxMint 18.1 How to downgrade Sigil from 9.x to 8.2

[harryg123]

The "improvements" in Sigil 9.x are a hindrance for me, such as the modal window for metadata, its new interface, and the current propensity of Sigil to convert all of my existing html entities to actual utf-8 code, and then doubling them in the process. (For example in an existing web page there could be the Pali word paññā, which was entered in the original html as "paññ& #257;" Or a left double curly quote as $ldquo; )

These sometimes end up as "paññññā" or " ““ ".

Rather than report a bug, I'd just as soon luddite myself back to a version that works just fine for my needs.

Can't find an answer on the net. Now trying to copy the various files in /usr/bin ... in my old Mint 17.0 partition to the partition containing 18.1.

But what's the 'right' way to devolve to a previous version in Linux?

BTW the sigil is now in the repository, but just the wrong version (for me).


-Harry

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by harryg123

[...] the current propensity of Sigil to convert all of my existing html entities to actual utf-8 code[...]

You can define a list of entities to be preserved via:

Edit > Preferences > Preserve Entities

Originally Posted by harryg123

[...] and then doubling them in the process.

That's actually a libxml2 bug. For more information, see this post.

[DiapDealer]

As Doitsu mentioned, the entity doubling is a known bug caused by your system's version of libxml2, so there's no need to report it anyway. And downgrading Sigil won't fix the issue on that particular machine (because the problem is not with Sigil). So if you're interested in working around the issue, there's a few ways to go about it:

1) A few threads up (in the sticky section) there's a thread titled "Linux-only libxml2 bug that affects Sigil on newer systems" that contains instructions for installing a patched version of libxml2 to your existing Sigil install.

2) You could also try the unofficial Linux installer package (also found in the sticky thread section). It includes a patched version of libxml2.

3) You could build Sigil yourself. There's instructions in the docs folder of the source that tell how to build your own patched version of libxml2 along side of Sigil.

If you still wish to downgrade Sigil, I could tell you exactly how to remove 0.9.x, but I'd need to know how you installed it in the first place. To get the older version, you'd probably need to grab the source and build it yourself (instructions are in the docs folder).