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SIGIL, free ePub editor

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Eóin:
Curt, when starting from a clean install MikTeX + LyX is quite easy. But when it comes to recovering from an old or failed install the MikTeX installer leaves a lot to be desired.

Curt:
-yes, but  IIRC  back then I could only test LyX if I also installed MikTeX. This limitation has now gone - at least, I had no problems when I tested LyX just a few weeks ago.

Curt:
from "Making epub happen. The development blog of Sigil, the epub editor"

http://sigildev.blogspot.com/2011/02/analysis-of-epub3-and-uh-bit-more.html
excerpt:

An analysis of EPUB3 (and, uh, a bit more)

... In EPUB2, JavaScript execution was under RFC2119 “SHOULD NOT”; for all intents and purposes, this means forbidden. It’s not a “MUST NOT”, but still.

In EPUB3, JS support is now optional. This means you can start using JS in your epub books, yippee! You can now go all Web 2.0 on you e-books. I’ll talk about why this is bad in a moment, but first I’ll like to give credit where credit is due and note that the spec text explicitly mentions  that content creators should avoid using JS if at all possible. Here’s a quote:

   >> Scripting consequently should be used only when essential to the User experience, as it greatly increases the likelihood that content will not be portable across all Reading Systems and creates barriers to accessibility and content reusability. <<

Sadly, no one will listen to this. But at least the IDPF has this warning, even though it won't do shit. Now that JS support has moved from "should not" to "optional", people will go out of their way to redefine "essential to the user experience" so that it includes JS. This will break horribly. We'll get epub books created solely for iBooks and all other Reading Systems can go to hell.

Progressive enhancement? We will never see it. The people who create epub books are not web developers, they work in publishing. They have no idea what writing code for the web looks like (or writing code at all for that matter), so we'll see hacks upon hacks that work on iBooks pretty much by accident and on nothing else. I've always said that the day that the epub specs start mandating JS support is the day those same specs jump the shark. We're not quite there yet, but the gates of Hell are now slightly ajar.

This is what will happen:
   1. EPUB3 brings "optional" JS support.

   2. Publishers start adding crappy JS to their books hoping it will make them "stand out", "embrace the future", "fuck goats" or whatever.

   3. We now have thousands of books with JS scripts in them that are absolutely useless but whose execution is nevertheless required, otherwise reading the book is impossible. You know, things like special navigation menus, buttons to expand example source code, footnotes in "tooltip" style windows or similar "brilliant design ideas" that stop working when you don't run the book's JS.

   4. EPUB4 now demands JS support. I mean really, you can't expect publishers to go over all those crappy epubs and rework them with progressive enhancement in mind, do you? No, no, no. They'll just lobby the IDPF to make JS support mandatory, and they'll succeed.

   5. Welcome to the web circa 2000! Ah, what a fun place that was. ...
-sigildev
--- End quote ---
:tellme:

ewemoa:
Thanks for sharing this bit about epub and JS.

ewemoa:
From Sigil's Spiritual Successor @ Making epub happen:

At this point Sigil is no longer being actively developed. Moving development to Github has netted a few contributions but they were one offs and fairly minor. With Sigil development being stalled, Kovid (of calibre) starting making the tweak epub functionality in calibre into a full editor.

calibre's editor at this point is stable and has many of the features, though not all (yet), that are present in Sigil. Like Sigil, calibre's editor is open source and unlike Sigil is being actively developed. I've known Kovid for quite some time (though calibre) and I'm confident that the calibre editor is the way forward.

For people using Sigil, keep using it as long as it works for you. If you find it's not meeting your needs or if you want to see what else is out there I recommend checking out cailbre's editor. While it doesn't use any of Sigil's code I consider it Sigil's spiritual successor.

--- End quote ---


On *NIX, the successor in question appears to be called "ebook-edit".

A quick spin showed that it doesn't appear to be WYSIWIG -- ended up writing raw XHTML.  Functionality tested included: modifying a table of contents and adding a new page.

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