In the next article we are going to take a look at Sigil. This is an editing program for electronic books in the EPUB format, which is free and open source software, on which He already spoke to us a while ago a fellow on this blog. In the following lines we are going to see how we can install it in Ubuntu as a Flatpak package.
This program can be found available for Gnu/Linux, Windows and OS X, and is distributed under the GNU GPL license. Sigil supports WISIWYG and code editing of EPUB files, as well as importing HTML and plain text files.
Sigil has been developed by Strahinja Val Marković and other contributors since 2009. From July 2011 to June 2015, John Schember took over as lead developer. As of June 2015 Sigil development was spearheaded by Kevin Hendricks and Doug Massay. This completely free and open source software, is written and supported entirely by volunteers.
Sigil General Features
- In this free and open source software that is released under the GPLv3 license.
- The program is multi platform, so it can be run on Gnu/Linux, Windows and Mac.
- You have full support for UTF-16 and for EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 specifications.
- Available multiple views (code view and preview).
- The program will offer us a full control over direct editing of EPUB syntax in Code View.
- It also has a table of contents generator, with multi-level header support.
- Among the features we will find a metadata editor.
- The user interface of the program has been translated into many languages, among which is Spanish.
- The program you can check the spelling with default and user-configurable dictionaries.
- Offers a full regular expression support (PCRE) to find and replace.
- It will allow us import of EPUB and HTML files, images and style sheets.
- The functionalities of the program can be extended thanks to the accessories.
- Also has checkpoint support.
These are just some of the categories in the program. They can consult all of them in detail from the project website.
Install Sigil on Ubuntu as a Flatpak package
Given that the Sigil package that we can find in the Ubuntu repositories is old and no PPA now maintains the latest packages. Flatpak At the moment, it may be the only easy way to get a recent version of this EPUB editor for Gnu/Linux.
With this program's Flatpak package, most Gnu/Linux users can install and keep the Sigil package up to date. If you are using Ubuntu 20.04 and do not yet have Flatpak technology enabled on your computer, you can follow The Guide that a colleague wrote on this blog a while ago.
When you can install this type of packages, it is only necessary to open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and execute the following in it install command:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.sigil_ebook.Sigil.flatpakref
Once installed, you can find the program launcher on your system to start the program. In addition, it can also be started by typing in the terminal:
flatpak run com.sigil_ebook.Sigil
uninstall
To remove this installed ebook editor via Flatpak, it is only necessary to open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the command:
flatpak uninstall com.sigil_ebook.Sigil
Sigil was designed to make it easy to create eBooks using the EPUB format.. Whether you're formatting books for your own use, or a professional publisher publishing books on platforms, Sigil might be of interest to you. The program allows us to format and package our books in an EPUB, which will look exactly how you imagine it. All of this can be achieved using an advanced set of features, which have made this one of the most popular EPUB editors.
To obtain information about this project, users can consult the information offered in the project documentation, his GitHub repository.