Sigil 0.6.0 Released

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by njm55n

That's pretty clear. I would be delighted to learn how to compile from the sources, but am starting from such a low knowledge level (about Ubuntu, lots of experience with DOS, all versions WIndows, Novell etc) that I don't know where to begin.
I realise that this may not be the right forum to ask about OS related issues, but perhaps you could offer some pointers to how to go about it?

Guess it would be a good idea if someone could set up a ppa once and for all.

I've compiled sigil for my own PC but setting a ppa is someting else. We really need some effective way to get linux bundles.

[meme]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Guess it would be a good idea if someone could set up a ppa once and for all.

I've compiled sigil for my own PC but setting a ppa is someting else. We really need some effective way to get linux bundles.

You mean like the ppa that already exists?

From the main Sigil page, http://code.google.com/p/sigil/, there is a link to LinuxDistroPackages, which has a link to packages volunteers have made available.

It may not have everything, but there is one for Ubuntu. And rgibert has kindly built 0.6.0 for 12.04 and 12.10. 0.5.3 is available for older releases. If you need 0.6.0 on an older release then you could ask him, or you could build from source (which is actually quite straightforward and detailed in the RunningFromSource page on the wiki - though I have a post around here somewhere that details it even more step by step).

[JoHunt]

I just wanted to thank all involved for the fabulous update. Sigil 0.60 is a dream to work with - from the perfect cursor sync to new spellcheck options to the "go to link or style", etc. etc.

For me, Sigil has turned the tedium of working with ebooks into joy

[njm55n]

I wasn't asking how to set up a ppa, but would like to know how go about compiling Sigil for my own Ubuntu distro. Could you point me at the more detailed post you mentioned, please?
Also, how does one back out of a failed installation?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by njm55n

Could you point me at the more detailed post you mentioned, please?

Maybe this one?

For Windows users, there's also this one by kiwidude.

That, coupled with the RunningFromSource page on Sigil's Wiki should provide a pretty solid foundation for experimentation.

If you compile your own Qt 4.8 libs on an older version of Ubuntu, I recommend using update-alternatives to manage all the symbolic links to the various versions of qmake you might want to use to build projects with. In situations where Qt-4.8 isn't the system-wide Qt installed/configured you will have to (after successful compilation/install) create a custom launch script that adds the Qt-4.8 libs location to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable before launching Sigil. Very similar to what the sigil.sh script did in the older Sigil versions on Linux. Something as simple as:

#!/bin/sh

QTLIB_DIR="/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.8.2-64bit/lib"

if [ -z "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ]; then
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$QTLIB_DIR"
else
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$QTLIB_DIR:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
fi

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

exec sigil-real "$@"

Where sigil-real is the actual sigil executable.

[mrmikel]

I had an unusual problem when I was previewing my document. I had a couple of places where an question mark which was thrown in but which did not show up in Sigil or even in notepad++. Is it possible for ASCII 160s or other invisible characters to be stored in a document but not have them display?

I retyped the whole line and the question marks went away in Reader Library.

I explored further and where the ? are displayed in Reader Library, you can insert the cursor in Sigil, press delete and nothing will apparently happen. But that deletes the hidden character.

Yet further research reveals the trouble character to be C2 in Hex, 194 in decimal. It does not display.

[DiapDealer]

@mrmikel: what you're seeing is probably the result of a document that originally may have misrepresented itself with regard to its own character encoding. I've often seen characters that editors can't translate (using the DOCTYPE or meta-tag charset declarations indicated) represented as the "Â" (Capital A with Circumflex) character (which is what 194 is). Either that or the Capital A with Acute character (Á). Although either of those characters should be viewable in Sigil -- in Book View or in Code View. It's altogether possible that the Circumflex Capital A character can't be represented with the default fonts in the ePub rendering software/device, though.

I tend to use the EditPad Lite editor -- specifically because it allows me to easily interpret the original document as if it were encoded with a different character set. It allows me to fix potentially wrong DOCTYPE and/or meta-tag charset declarations, so I can make sure I'm dealing with valid utf-8/16 before opening the document with Sigil. Plus its regex F&R engine just kicks ass.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I had an unusual problem when I was previewing my document. I had a couple of places where an question mark which was thrown in but which did not show up in Sigil or even in notepad++. Is it possible for ASCII 160s or other invisible characters to be stored in a document but not have them display?

I retyped the whole line and the question marks went away in Reader Library.

I explored further and where the ? are displayed in Reader Library, you can insert the cursor in Sigil, press delete and nothing will apparently happen. But that deletes the hidden character.

Yet further research reveals the trouble character to be C2 in Hex, 194 in decimal. It does not display.

I have had that problem - hidden characters that are v hard to remove because they are invisible in sigil ( and show as ? on sony reader ). like you I have to put cursor where I know they are lurking and use delete. It would be good to be able to make them visible / zap them with find / replace but I never found a way to do that.
I don't know if my hidden character was same as yours - mine was some representation of some sort of dash. I messed with notepad += & was sometimes able to change them into an A + circumflex combination, but that did not help with removing/ replacing them.

[signum]

Try opening the problem html with an external editor. In Sigil: right-click the html file name, choose "open with" and tell it where to find your favorite editor. You might get lucky and be able to see and fix the non-displayable characters.

[cybmole]

well the OP tried notepad++, I tried that, and Word..... no joy. some characters just don't want to be seen

[DiapDealer]

It's too late once the original document has been opened in Sigil. Sigil automatically does what it can to convert/translate text as utf-8/16. If the character encoding on the original document is unknown (or the charset declaration is incorrect), that's where the weird characters usually get introduced.

It's true that SOME special characters/entities are hard/impossible to see in Sigil, but  is just not one of them. It's usually special unicode space codepoints that are hard to locate visually.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cybmole

well the OP tried notepad++, I tried that, and Word..... no joy. some characters just don't want to be seen

when I get one of those, I resort to an antique DOS program:
LI.COM (or LIST.COM) that has a HEX edit/view so you can see the bytes.

Since this is Old DOS (before long name support, and even Mouse Use ), you will need to get used to navigating by cursorkeys and the 8.3 name with a squiggle (~) in it. I recommend you never try and change a file name using this old tool.

[mrmikel]

I was able to find XVI32.exe on the web, which is freeware, to display the file.

I had some sort of dash there also in the original which was a web page at hyperwar. After conversion in calibre, it showed as a an n with a tilde over it, which I deleted, but which left this odd invisible character. I will have to be careful of these, since no encoding is specified in the original file which was probably 8859-1, though who knows!

On the web it looks like a plain old hyphen.

[elibrarian]

Some more moderne editors have hex mode - PSPad comes to my mind. I think there is a plugin for NPP too.

Wikipedia has a comparison list of hex-editor, so one can pick one's own poison

Regards

Kim

[mrmikel]

Thanks for the tip on PSPad, it does display the A grave, so it is easy to spot in both its text editor mode as well as the hex display.

I will add it to my open with collection, so I can use it when I am having similar troubles again!