Sigil-0.9.11 Released

[DiapDealer]

For the impatient, the installer files (and source) can be found as assets at the bottom of the Github Release page.

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This Sigil release is a mix of bug fixes and new features for both epub2 and epub3 users. Some of the highlights for this release include:

Starting with Sigil-0.9.11, Sigil's ini preference files will be utf-8 encoded to more easily allow users to manually edit them. NOTE: before upgrading to Sigil-0.9.11, please make and save a backup of your preferences files. There is no issue with the conversion moving forward, but if, for whatever reason, you need to roll back to an earlier version of Sigil, utf-8 encoded unicode characters in your ini files will not work with earlier versions of Sigil. So please be safe and make a backup just in case.

The Windows and Mac installers have been updated to use Qt5.11.2 and Python 3.7.

Restore ability to click in the Preview window to reposition to the same point in Code View while keeping the ability to follow links in Preview.

Allow users to maintain up to 5 external programs per file type with the Open With feature.

Sigil 0.9.11+ no longer suports Windows Vista.

Sigil 0.9.11+ no longer supports macOS 10.9 and macOS 10.10. macOS upgrades are available for free directly from Apple.

The specific changes/additions follow...

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Bug Fixes

• after mend and prettify - put cursor at enclosing tag if possible
• allow both links in Preview and clicking in Preview to reposition CV
• fix new cursor repositioning under new tab ala Spellcheck
• fix prettyprinting of the mark tag in gumbo and sigil_bs4
• fix crash when tagname illegally (for xhtml) includes single or double quotes
• fix crash in Reports for non-wellformed xhtml that was okay under html5
• fix deletion of multiple css files when Book View is open (Windows)
• fix bug in reformat CSS with media queries
• fix bug in closing some tabs needlessly when linking stylesheets
• fix crash bug in gumbo parser under very strange circumstances
• remove empty guide elements in epub2 opf as epubcheck now flags these
• fix issue with index generation reordering spine entries under certain conditions

New Features

• update official builds to use Qt 5.11.2 and Python 3.7
• update internal Python modules to use latest versions
• update Sigil's gumbo parser to fix all known bugs and greatly speedup parsing
• embed new project css_parser (fork of cssutils) as a python library to fix css parsing
• Sigil no longer attempts to upgrade the VC++ runtime on Windows. It only installs the
  bundled VC++ runtime if there is no compatible version already installed
• add support for internal but unmanifested opf metadata link resources under epub3
• extend "Open With" context menu to allow up to 5 external editors per resource type
• make format of all Sigil ini files to be utf-8 encoded to more easily allow user changes

Be aware that Sigil-0.9.11 still enforces the need for epub3 to have and support an NCX so that it generates as backward a compatible epub as possible. This may be relaxed in future releases.

Sigil-0.9.11 like its predecessors passed all of the following tests for epub3 support: iframe, img, audio, video , mathml, svg (except for svg support in the spine), javascript, and of course recognizing and allowing html5 specific tags like section, and etc. Sigil-0.9.1 also supports javascript based local-storage and display of embedded pdfs.

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Download Location

The official location for downloading this Sigil release (and all official releases) is:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/releases

The latest version of the Sigil User Guide can be downloaded from: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/sigil...eleases/latest

Downloading binaries from anyplace else is simply NOT a good idea as they could inject anything into their own downloads. After downloading, please verify the downloaded binary exactly matches what was originally posted by running an SHA 256 checksum on the file before installing it. See the file Sigil-0.9.11-CHECKSUMS.sha256.txt for the correct checksums for each file and instructions for how to calculate a SHA 256 Checksum for your download. The Mac OS X Package has also been code signed with my Apple Developer signature.

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Windows Users

If your current version of Sigil is 0.9.6 or earlier, it's recommended (but not required) that you uninstall that version before installing 0.9.11. Some compiled Python files have had their file extentions changed (as well as the change to Python 3.7). As a result, there will be a lot of extraneous files left lying around if you just install the new over the old. It won't cause any functionality problems, but if disk space is at a premium, you may want to clean things up a bit. You can do this by uninstalling Sigil at any time (even after 0.9.11 is installed) and reinstalling. Doing so won't affect your any of your preferences, plugins, keyboard shortcuts, clips, saved searches, etc.

Linux Users

There are currently no official binary releases available for Linux on the Sigil Release page. Please check with your favorite distro's software repositories to see if they have Sigil for installation via your OS's package management system. If not, there are build instructions for compiling Sigil yourself in the source archive's docs directory: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/tree/master/docs

Don't forget the FlightCrew plugin

Please note, the epub2 validator FlightCrew has been converted to a plugin for Sigil 0.8.900 and later.
This plugin has been updated for Sigil-0.9.3 (and later). It can be downloaded from the official Sigil-Ebook flightcrew repository if you have not already installed it.

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/fligh...eleases/latest

Attention Mac OS X Users

Per the recommendation of www.python.org (see https://www.python.org/download/mac/tcltk/), due to bugs and the age of Apple's internal Tcl library, you should also download and install ActiveState's ActiveTcl Community Edition. To get the latest bug fixes, Sigil-0.9.11's embedded Python has been linked with version: Tcl 8.6.4.1

We may not redistribute this Package with Sigil due to ActiveState's binary non-redistribution policy.

So please, if you have not already done so download and install this version of ActiveState's Active Tcl Community Edition, until we get a chance to do our own build of Tcl 8.6.X from source for future releases. ActiveState is a primary contributor to www.python.org and a respected and trusted source for python and tcl/tk related binaries on both Windows and Mac OS X.

See: http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads
Version: 8.6.4.1 or later 8.6.X release

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Signed Source Archives and Git Tags

Starting with Sigil v0.9.9, the Git tags and source archives used for Sigil releases are signed with Doug Massay's PGP Key. His public key can be found and retrieved from any public key server. The fingerprint for his public key is:

B5A5 6206 AB0F BC1A 24EF AB8A A166 D29A 8FCD AC63

Some Additional things

When you fire up Sigil for the very first time:

• navigate to the new General Preferences and select the default
  epub version you plan to work with (epub 2 or epub3) so that new
  empty ebooks start with the correct code.
• if you plan to work with epub3 epubs, you should change your
  PreserveEntities setting to use ONLY NUMERIC entities.
  For example use   for non-breaking spaces and etc.
• We strongly recommend enabling Mend On Open in your settings
  for best performance with Sigil.

[Savate]

Hi - great program - really useful. For some reason this URL doesn't seem to work:

https://sigil-ebook.com/donate
or
http://sigil-ebook.com/donate

As you see I'd like to donate to support development ... let me know

[KevinH]

As volunteers, we do not accept donations at this time. If you still want to help in some way, bug reports and testing are always appreciated. Or alternatively consider a donation to your favorite charity instead.

[DiapDealer]

Neither Kevin or myself are currently accepting any donations for our work on Sigil. But we thank you for the thought.

Having said that, however, there does seem to be an issue with the sigil-ebook.com domain. The domain name is paid up through 10/2019, so I can only assume it's Wordpress's fault. You can still access our website via sigilebook.wordpress.com. But the donation page won't give any joy there, regardless.

I think I'm just going to move our website to Github Pages and be done with Wordpress. We haven't utilized (or needed, really) a "blog" in a long time.

Thanks for your interest, but just enjoy the program. Maybe contribute to keeping the User Guide current if you have the time, talent, or inclination.

[dynabook]

I am finding a weird effect on my Mac. The open file tabs have no "close" X and I have only been able to close the tabs by clicking around on the tab. I am running OS 10.14.2.
I have updated TCL to 8.6.8.0.
--MH

[KevinH]

Yes, I am seeing this with both Qt 5.11.2 and Qt 5.12.0 but not with Qt 5.6.2.
The close icon is actually there at the left edge of the tab but it can not be seen.
If you mouse over where it should be on the tab and hover the mouse pointer, the tooltip for close will actually appear and in fact clicking in that corner where the icon should be does in fact close the tab.

So this is a cosmetic Qt bug that seems to impact Mac. I will look for a work around as nothing in Sigil controls this.

Kevin

Originally Posted by dynabook

I am finding a weird effect on my Mac. The open file tabs have no "close" X and I have only been able to close the tabs by clicking around on the tab. I am running OS 10.14.2.
I have updated TCL to 8.6.8.0.
--MH

[KevinH]

FWIW - this is a very very long standing bug in Qt that is related to allowing use of qss files.

Here is the official Qt Bug Report that describes the issue:

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-61092

So there really isn't anything I can do to fix this. Luckily this is only cosmetic.

Sorry. Every time we upgrade Qt we fix old bugs but get just as many if not more new bugs and this is one of those.

Note in MainWindow.cpp we use setStyleSheet on the Tabs to make them cleaner looking which is why this bug still exists even in Qt 5.12.1

KevinH

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

New Features

• embed new project css_parser (fork of cssutils) as a python library to fix css parsing

Speaking of... have you had a chance to look at maybe devendoring this and using the version from PyPI? If you're happy with the changes, then I guess you could simply tag a new css_parser release.

@KevinH, any specific Sigil issue this change is fixing? https://github.com/ebook-utils/css-p...f885286325a977

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Linux Users

There are currently no official binary releases available for Linux on the Sigil Release page. Please check with your favorite distro's software repositories to see if they have Sigil for installation via your OS's package management system. If not, there are build instructions for compiling Sigil yourself in the source archive's docs directory: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/tree/master/docs

On it roughly soonish.

[KevinH]

We will continue to use our embedded version for the next release and then switch over to using our PyPI version after that. That said, css_parser will not be an optional python package (ie. it must be treated like lxml) as it will be needed for Sigil proper to work if anyone asks Sigil to prettify a css stylesheet.

You should be able to use the pypi version now and simply add a script to remove the embedded version until we get aroung to it. Nothing else need be changed.

Yes that css parser change is to fix a bug that broke parsing of calc( 1 / 1 ) and similar things where ratio products needed only for media queries interfered with calcs that used integer ratios.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Speaking of... have you had a chance to look at maybe devendoring this and using the version from PyPI? If you're happy with the changes, then I guess you could simply tag a new css_parser release.

@KevinH, any specific Sigil issue this change is fixing? https://github.com/ebook-utils/css-p...f885286325a977



On it roughly soonish.

[DiapDealer]

Yes. In my testing, you can safely remove css_parser from the source for packaging (as long as you make the PyPI version of css_parser a hard dep).

EDIT: Oh... and if you're looking for other things to patch in this version, make sure you check out https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/issues/394 before releasing 0.9.11 on Arch.

[eschwartz]

Yeah, I knew it was part of the mandatory sigil core. While I am at it, I can dump cssutils from the optdepends as plugins should be moving to css_parser anyway...

@DiapDealer, interesting bug, I'll make sure to wait on a bugfix for it.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

While I am at it, I can dump cssutils from the optdepends as plugins should be moving to css_parser anyway...

They will be moving to css_parser, but we haven't really started that ball rolling yet. Dumping cssutils might break a handful of plugins, but we can walk them through fixing their plugins pretty easily. I hoped to have an input hook in place before cssutils gets dumped, but it didn't work out for this release.

[eschwartz]

Either way, it's hardly recommended anymore.

[KevinH]

Okay, I have a workaround for this that should work for all Mac OS X users with the latest Sigil-0.9.11

Using a text editor please create the following text file:

qt_styles.qss

Notice the name must be an exact match: qt_styles.qss not .css

And add the following 2 lines to it:

QTabBar::close-button { background-image: url(:/qt-project.org/styles/commonstyle/images/standardbutton-closetab-16.png);}
QTabBar::close-button:hover { background-image: url(:/qt-project.org/styles/commonstyle/images/standardbutton-closetab-hover-16.png);}

Then copy that file to your Sigil Preferences folder which on a Mac can be found by Sigil->Preferences and hitting the Open Preferences Location button at the bottom of the window.

This should take you to /Users/YOURUSERID/Library/ApplicationSupport/sigil-ebook/sigil/

which is where you want to put the qt_styles.qss file you made.

Then exit Sigil completely and restart it.

You should now have close buttons back on your tabs (and official ones from qt as well)

This will fully workaround the bug in Qt for macOS in Qt 5.11.2

Hope this helps,

Kevin


Alternatively you can use the ones we have built into Sigil (which I personally find a bit uglier but ...) in your qt_styles.qss file:

QTabBar::close-button { background-image: url(:/main/widget-close-16.png);}
QTabBar::close-button:hover { background-image: url(:/main/widget-close-16.png);}

Originally Posted by dynabook

I am finding a weird effect on my Mac. The open file tabs have no "close" X and I have only been able to close the tabs by clicking around on the tab. I am running OS 10.14.2.
I have updated TCL to 8.6.8.0.
--MH

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Dumping cssutils might break a handful of plugins, but we can walk them through fixing their plugins pretty easily.

I've just tested the cssRemoveUnusedSelectors, RemoveInLineStyles and Kindle Import plugins with the Sigil 0.9.11 Windows version, and they all appear to be working fine.