Introduction To eBook Converters:
When you have a format which you can read on multiple devices, you are good to go. That would be the perfect scenario to enjoy your books. But then, sadly that’s not the scene today. With multiple devices coming out in the market every day, you are left confused. You have the industry big Amazon coming out with its Kindle device. The Kindle device, of course, supports only the Mobi file format. Now there are some eBook reading apps and devices which will support only just ePub. Now because of these differences you as a reader, you will have to get a load number of readers. This is where the basic eBook format converters come into play. Thus, Sigil is something that we all have heard in relation to getting files to be converted. Hence, you can see them in relation to others in the list like Calibre.
Sigil And It’s Origins:
You can get Sigil into your system for free from their homepage. It is loaded less installation file which won’t take up much place on your system. The basic working of Sigil is as clear and easy as Calibre. They both convert files into one another. Hence, you can convert PDF to Word, Word to PDF, Epub to PDF, Epub to Mobi, and Mobi to PDF, to start off with things. Thus, with Sigil in your system, you do not have to worry about any other text software at all. Hence, you just have to drag and drop eBook files into this window and wait for the output. Of course, you will have to specify which output you require in the drop down options. Once, you are clear in what you want, you can derive any output you want. It’s as simple as creating a Word document.
With Sigil, you no longer have to buy different devices or install different apps for reading. You can open any file with any app. Of course, with its clear user interface, you are never lost for options. The software as such supports both Drag-n-Drop feature, and Browse to get books style. Also, with new updates, Sigil has given more options for a user. Presently, you can load up your files from a cloud drive too. Sigil supports most cloud drives like Google Drive, DropBox, OPenDrive etc. Just copy the link, and you are good to go. Do you have some files located in a remote location? Do you want Sigil to convert them too? Don’t worry. You can insert inputs from URL’s as well. Just have your friends or users, upload their books on an internal server.
Sigil Epub Files And Convert Them:
With Sigil ebook reader you have various options which will help you get the most of your eBooks. Have you ever wondered about using a same eBook reader device or app for all your eBook? Of course, switching between converters is a huge trouble. Reading apps like Aldiko, Mantano, BlueFire or Helicon readers for both iOS or Android, all support ePub files. This is not much of a surprise because ePub by itself is something of a universal eBook form. Most of our eBooks today are being made in ePub eBook. Yes, the scenario is slowly changing with Mobi trying to make a mark, as a result of Kindle devices and apps. Epubs are making their mark.
Sigil helps you convert eBooks into ePub files so that you can read them anywhere. And even if that’s not the case, this eBook reader is much help to Publishing companies. A publishing company may use Sigil for converting eBooks to a uniform format. Most publishers all over the world use the base source codes of Sigil to prepare books in the way they want them. Within this article, we will see as to why Sigil is perhaps the better eBook conversion tool than Calibre.
Features of Sigil:
Sigil as we saw earlier, is a simple tool to use. It’s a classical looking window which will have you up and working in mere seconds. Everything is so well explained that you won’t have any problem using the tool. The simple window has three or four browser buttons which allow you to get going with your work. The first things you will see is the file browser with files and directories. File are the books which you want to convert. Of course, directories which are the file locations. But that’s not all, you can still use HTML tags as well. If you are wondering what an HTML tag is, well simply put they are predefined codes. Thus, with these codes, you can tell the software what you want from it. In addition to this, you always have your CSS style codes tab within the window.
The whole user interface of the software tool has a preview panel. This allows you to see and change things on a live basis. Never again do you have to worry about how the output will look after doing all the hard work. The user window also gives you an option of a table of contents, and a frame for verifying eBooks too. Having said this, why do you need eBook validation services. This is important because you will have to undertake the conversion only when the input is free of errors. Thus, you are ensuring that the output eBooks are free of any mistakes that may happen in the window of entry. You also have your Print ready features which help you get the best output possible for an eBook conversion. Thus, Sigil is a tool which helps you complete the work as you wish.
Sigil ePub Editor:
When opening a new project, the book browser creates empty directories to fill them with text, CSS styles, images, fonts, audio, video, and other types of files. You also have your Multiple tabs, which are supported, so multiple files can be juggled at the same time. Apart from opening ePub, HTML (XHTML), RTF and TXT files, you have the option to add blank stylesheets, HTML files, and SVG images to put together the ePub file. Therefore, this is a very handy feature, which allows you to toggle book and code view with just a keyboard shortcut. Hence, you get the simplest of tasks done without moving away from your present window. You can control multiple elements of the book conversion from inside one window. After all, you have Sigil in your system to make life easier for you.
With Sigil, you have the option to split the content into two different files. Thus, you can place your cursor in the position and right click to split. Thereby, all the content before that position remains in the original file. Also, the remaining part of the content is instantly opened in the new file automatically. The remaining part is saved and showed in a different tab for further working. Likewise, users can insert split markers (horizontal lines) to take their position into account later and span multiple documents.
One other notable feature for Sigil is it instantly records all clips and lets users paste any of them from Clipboard. Users can insert Images, videos, and audio tracks from external files, along with IDs, links, closing tags, and special characters after studying a map (e.g. non-breaking space, soft hyphen, omega, infinity).
Formatting And Search Options In Sigil:
A user has several types of headings available with previously given codes, which he can use. Thus, he can apply these codes to text, paragraphs or other given texts. You can also find other formatting options such as bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript, and superscript. In addition to this, you can define the text alignment, bullet or numbered lists, indentation size, and text direction (left to right, or right to left).
Sigil’s search function comes loaded with a few filters, such as minimal match, case sensitive, or regular expression mode, as well as direction (up or down). Additionally, you can use just the current file, or select all, or just HTML files, replace words automatically, and count all matches. Users may also set bookmarks, go to a particular link or style, and jump to lines.
Practical Tools In Sigil:
You can assign a cover to the eBook with images, video, and audio. You can also long press on the book file, and edit its metadata regarding title, author, language, and other basic properties and roles. Also, you can generate a table of contents by selecting headings and from the right click options select the table of contents. Of course, you can select an existing table of contents file, create, and edit an index and add new entries. Thus, in more options, you can enable a spell checker that supports highlighting, validate the ePub and stylesheets as well. Additionally, you have the option to save searches to use them in future projects. Also, clean up ePub content and reduce file size by deleting unused media files or stylesheet groups.
As previously mentioned, the clips panel gives users the possibility to insert HTML tags and CSS styles quickly. However, these predefined clips can be edited or removed, while new ones can be added to the list, classified into different groups, as well as exported to INI format and later imported.
Reports can be easily compiled to find out various statistics for HTML, image and CSS files, style classes in HTML and CSS links, and characters in HTML. These include the total size, words, misspelled words, images, video, audio, and stylesheets in HTML, together with size, frequency, width, height, pixels, and color in images.
Sigil Program Preferences:
As we saw in the above discussion, the clips panel gives users the possibility to insert HTML tags and CSS styles within quickly. However, these predefined clips can be edited or removed, while new ones can be added to the list, classified into different groups, as well as exported to INI format and later imported.
Reports can be easily compiled to find out various statistics for HTML, image and CSS files, style classes in HTML and CSS links, and characters in HTML. These include the total size, words, misspelled words, images, video, audio, and stylesheets in HTML, together with size, frequency, width, height, pixels, and color in images.
Using Sigil To Getting Control Of Your eBooks:
One line at a time was the thinking in early eBook days. However, with time changing and new tools coming into the market, you knew that you could process multiple files easily. Thus, you could select multiple books, files, and formats, and come with outputs for all. As simple as that. But, with these options came to a scene of chaos and confusion. You had a greater chance of messing up with one input instruction and never go back. Of course, with new tools and updates, you can steer clear of such mistakes which allow showing control on everything you do. Everything you do should show in the output in a way you want to.
With the new updates available for Sigil over the year, you can derive more info about the books you are processing. The new Reports dialog is one of them. It provides a very handy overview of length (in words) and the amount of misspelled words for each chapter file, how large your images are (both in KB and pixels), which elements each chapter files uses and in which CSS files those elements are described, and so on.
Sigil will also reformat the contents of the CSS files for you, in case you prefer single-line selectors over multiline ones or vice versa. At the end of the day, it is your call and how you want to do the conversion of books. And here’s another time-saver for you. You don’t have to manually add the code for linking to a CSS file anymore. You just have to select all your HTML files in the sidebar (click on the first, press Shift, click on the last), right-click, select “Link Stylesheets,” pick the CSS files to link to. That’s it.
Index Editors In Sigil:
In case you’ve no idea what an index is, it’s a section of a book that lists terms along with pages where those terms show up. It’s quite useful for documents like all kinds of reference books, textbooks and so on. I’ll keep a detailed explanation of creating indexes for a tutorial, but you’ll be glad to know that you can make quite complex indexes with Sigil. You can make groups, e.g. for an alphabet-based index. Additionally, You can use regular expressions for matching the text. Also, You can merge synonyms into a single index entry. The primary tool here is the Index Editor. Index editor is the pass through which you can define the matching text, the final index entry (if it should be written differently) and hierarchy.
Making Sigil Applicable To Different Regions:
Sigil 0.6.0 is (at least partially) available in 23 languages. New translations are Galician, Indonesian, Central Khmer, Korean, Romanian, and Uighur. Additionally, far more UI elements were made translatable, including advanced metadata fields. Internationalization was also improved, e.g. in several user-visible cases, plural forms are handled properly. This way you have the support for all the support for Eastern scripts. Therefore, you are in an excellent position to handle right to left scripts which will allow you to go for the editing with no hurdles ever. Most of the eBook readers do not have the tools to handle Eastern languages and fail to process.
Conclusion For Sigil:
With Sigil, of course, you have the options to control the output to the last line of the input. With the input going in, you will have all the freedom to convert any books of any formats depending on the device and app needs. All to say, you will have the facility to go beyond the usual and make almost Kindle read PDFs, Epubs, etc. Also, You can use this free to use tool to derive your eBook needs. You no longer have to worry about using different readers for viewing and reading multiple eBooks. However, having said that the eBook conversion tool, Sigil has you covered, there are still some things you may falter at.
The problems with using tools such as Sigil is that you are not sure of the output. With complex inputs, you may end with blurry outputs. The images, alignments, captions, videos, hyperlinks etc may get awry and defeat the whole purpose of conversion in the first place. Thus, you may see that this is not entirely the solution for the book needs you have. At this point, you may have to consider that the perfect conversion services are always given by the form conversion publishers. You may just have to give the publishers the input files and sit back and relax. The publishers will ensure that the formats are converted and compatible with all the given needs. They are indeed working and remain as true as possible to the texts. We are a world-renowned publishing services company which will give you all the freedom to convert with zero trouble from on your side.
