Software Update: Sigil 1.9.0

Sigil is an open source ebook editor with extensive options, which is being developed for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The program can import both EPUB and HTML files, including formatting and images. The support for epub2 is one hundred percent and that for epub3 is almost complete. It can further generate a multi-level table of contents and edit the epub syntax directly in the code view. In version 1.9.0 the following changes and improvements have been made:

WARNING: this release is not working on Windows 7. This was not a conscious decision and options are being considered. In the meantime, Windows 7 users should stick with version 1.8.0 of Sigil

In addition to several performance enhancements, Sigil-1.9.0 represents a mix of bug fixes and new features. Though this official release is still Qt5 for the Windows and MacOS packages, we’ve made it possible to build Sigil with Qt6 and will be officially moving to Qt6 in a near-future release. Note that PySide6 will be the new Qt-for-Python of choice for plugins when official Qt6 versions of Sigil are released. We have a plan to make sure the transition of plugins currently using PyQt5 to support both PyQt5 and PySide6 as painless as possible. Stay tuned.

Bug Fixes:

• Update gumbo to follow WhatWG changes for closing br and p tags in foreign content
• Fix Saved Search Controls code typo for Tabbed Html Files
• Plug long existent memory leaks related to Saved Searches that stop after a match is found
• More file position of 0 fixes and handle toInt() result failures from N/A in ValidationResults
• Fix incorrectly copied permissions with AddContentFileToFolder after QFile::copy
• Fix broken page up/down by key sequence in Repo Log and Automate Log.
• Fix broken PluginRunner error signal

New Features:

• Make Validation Results sortable by clicking on column header
• Add Export All to Validation Results for text or csv output
• Completely redesign Find Replace and Saved Searches to not overload wrap when searching multiple targets and add “Restart Search” button to make skipping replacements in Saved Searches possible
• Update to use the PCRE2 library for regular expression searching
• Add a new Sigil Preferences settings to disable GPU acceleration for QtWebEngine/Preview to make it easier for Sigil to keep working even with older graphics drivers
• Add indicator to MainWindow titlebar that indicates if epub in old Sigil Standard form
• Support building from source on macOS M1 (arm64) machines
• Update Windows and Mac embedded python to Python 3.9.9
• Allow building Sigil with Qt6.2.2+ or Qt5.10+ from the same codebase
• Speed ​​up “Add Blank HTML” in epubs with huge numbers of files
• Store and set Epub Zip modification dates where possible
• Support PySide6 to replace PyQt5 in plugins when building Sigil under Qt6
• Handle deprecated embedded Python PyEvalInitThreads properly during build
• Support QUiTool in PySide6 under Qt6 for plugins using .ui files
• MacOS Python 3.9.9 now now includes TclTK 8.6.12 (no external TclTk package needed anymore)
• Added Select All Checkbox in Delete Unused Media and CSS (PRs from @luisparravicini)
• Add ability to rename classes when editing stylesheet in CV, will rename in all html as needed
• SpellcheckEditor now uses LocaleAware sorting vs Case-Insensitive which did not handle diacritics well
• Speed ​​up loading of epubs with large numbers of xhtml files by using concurrency
• New Hunspell spelling dictionaries based on scowl size 70 for en_GB and en_US
• Support ending “.” in spellchecker wordbreaks for better abbreviations if dictionary aff supports it
• Faster CSS stylesheet reformating that can handle minor errors and still function