The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

First mentioned by ChemZ here, I keep meaning to test this out so I can do more than just a "here's a program" post but this has been on my todo list for way too long...

License: GPL

OS Support: Windows XP/Vista/7/8 and Wine. Clients available for Linux and Mac.

PA's version: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/sigil-portable
Homepage: https://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Authoring- ... igil.shtml

Old thread update: no update since the last post but a very positive review: http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/window ... 0816.shtml

... and the WPP version: X-Sigil http://www.winpenpack.com/en/download.php?view.1339

Sigil Portable update to ver 0.8.0:
- web site: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/sigil-portable
- direct download: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/portab ... urce=accel
- Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-S ... able.shtml

About the author:
John's Blog: https://john.nachtimwald.com/2014/09/27 ... -released/
John's Blog download page (GitHub): https://github.com/user-none/Sigil/releases

Download location has changed:
The download location has changed sine the last release. This is because Google Code has stopped providing or allowing new downloads. Existing downloads will eventually be removed from the service completely.
(from John's Blog)

rbon wrote:Sigil Portable update to ver 0.8.0

Great news, thanks rbon.

Sigil Portable update to ver 0.8.1:
- web site: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/sigil-portable
- direct download: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/portab ... urce=accel
- Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-S ... able.shtml

About the Author:
- John's Blog: http://john.nachtimwald.com/2014/10/12/ ... -released/
- What's new: https://github.com/user-none/Sigil/blob ... ngeLog.txt

Sigil Portable update to ver 0.9.4:
- web site: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/sigil-portable
- direct download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/portab ... e/download
- Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-S ... able.shtml

This one is still seeing active development with v0.9.6 coming out a few days ago:
http://www.softpedia.com/progChangelog/ ... 27568.html

Suggestions

• If you're familiar with CHM files, this is in the same neighborhood. EPUB files very similar with some nice extras.
• It helps to think of this as a fairly simple HTML editor. In fact if you go into the “clip editor” you'll see that all the formatting tools have very simple HTML equivalent.
• This isn't a full word processor; you're not going to want to write in this program but move other text into it and add formatting.

Thoughts

• I was really impressed by the thought and time put into this. There are some intelligent functions that I wouldn't expect in a free offering, and the interface is solid. Despite having written quite a few HOTWOs, I've never created something that would end up in an e-book so
  
  This program should go hand-in-hand tool with programs like calibre or TBookConverter, which do their best to convert files to and from ebook formats, but can't hope to always get it perfect. This is especially true with weird proprietary formats like DOC (MS Word) and AWS (Amazon Books).
  
  The program cooperates remarkably well with LibreOffice so you can do everything to your satisfaction in one and move it easily to the other. In fact I think that's how I'd approach this if I ever had an ebook project.

Wishlist

• Editor: Unlimited, step-by-step undo (right now it seems to handle undo in chunks. So lots of small changes seem to get skipped, instead just jumping ahead or back.
• More Undo doesn't seem to work very well in the book browser and clip editor, where something moved is not easily undone.
• Clear Formatting option so if you accidentally paste in text that already has formatting, you can discard it easily without starting a new file. Currently you can't modify fonts without switching to the HTML view.
• Nested list improvements - so that you can have better bullets and sub-bullet groups. For numbers 1., 2., 3., etc. would have A. B. C. and so forth. Workaround: just use LibreOffice.
• Compression controls – right now EPUB files are saved with standard ZIP compresion at normal levels but most devices are smart enough to decompress ebooks very quickly. One workaround is running FileOptimizer on your EPUB files.
• Intro file, with anything advanced pointing to the online user guide.
• Acceptable File Types – it would help if the File – Add tool would filter out all results that were outside the acceptable formats (MP3 and M4V seemed to work but not 3GP or AVI).

I went ahead and posted the program:

Sigil
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2794

This post is for someone who explained to me why Amazon's KF8 and AWZ formats were junk. Hopefully this will help people avoid those formats by making competing formats look better.

Voted.

webfork wrote:This program should go hand-in-hand tool with programs like calibre...

• I sorely wish calibre would stop being the "king of the hill" of ebook management.
  
  The world desperately needs a standards compliant, non-iTunes inspired, alternative option -- preferably multi-platform and portable (in the local sense) -- for easy keeping of everything ebook.
  
  And that's including PDF, CHM, CBZ/CBR/CBx and ole plain text. Then we could all live ever after in peace and harmony...
  
  /RANT

Sigil recently got highlighted over at ycombinator and it looked like some interesting related tools and info in the resulting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24140752