Sigil 0.7 EPUB editor's previews go live

For the newly released Sigil 0.7.0, Sigil's developers set themselves the task of finishing features in the EPUB editor such as the previously introduced spellchecker and preview support. With that in mind, the new version now has support for live previews in a dockable view that can be placed on a second monitor for a quick way to see the effect of changes. The preview will update as changes are made to either the HTML or CSS; changes to CSS will be shown with a preview of the last displayed HTML tab being used as an example.

The spell checker sees its functionality rounded out too: it now opens its own dialog, where all the detected misspellings are shown along with a count of unique words, and has the ability to navigate to the use of a word in the document with just a click or a double-click to get to its next use. Once a word has been navigated to, the user can then ignore, add to dictionary, replace with a suggestion, or change every occurrence to a newly typed word. The spellcheck also supports multiple dictionaries, allowing for book-specific dictionary references and standard lists of names and places.

Other enhancements in Sigil include the ability to make simple changes to the generated table of contents without having to regenerate the TOC, a new clips toolbar which shows the first 20 clips and an ability to set up short cut buttons for the clips, a clips window, and "Autofill in Clips" which will create clips based on CSS files. New reports have been added too, including an All Files report covering overall sizes of files including fonts, and a Links report that will help ensure all links in a book point to valid destinations.

The developers note they have now migrated Sigil to using Qt5 which has an updated HTML rendering engine and support for audio and video previewing. One feature not in Sigil 0.7 is EPUB 3 support; the editor is still an EPUB 2 editor even though it supports some EPUB 3 features like audio and video. When EPUB 3 support will arrive is dependent on a number of issues, though the developers assure users that "EPUB 3 is not being ignored".

A full list of enhancements is in the change log. Prebuilt binaries for Sigil 0.7.0 that run on Windows, Mac and Linux and a zip-ball of the source code are available from the downloads folder of the project's Google Code site; the Google Code site also includes the source code repository, wiki and issue tracker. Sigil is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. A user guide is also available online.

(djwm)