Despite the announcement from developer John Schember [1] that he's no longer actively working on Sigil [2], things are still moving ahead. Schember might be concentrating only on merging other programmers' code into Sigil, but at the end of 2014, two new versions, Sigil 0.8 and 0.81, made it to market. Now, Sigil even provides some basic new functionality.

The news pleased fans of the application, because Sigil is a truly powerful e-book and XHTML editor that supports source code representation as well as a WYSIWYG. Although the newer versions of the Calibre e-book software provide similar functions, the emphasis is more on managing e-books than editing them. Both Sigil and Calibre can validate e-books to ensure that the results address readers' demands.

Sigil is not meant to replace an editor for writing e-books. Sigil starts where that process leaves off, concentrating on formatting and fine-tuning. You use Sigil to unclutter the source code or validate the XHTML files for publication. Sigil is also indispensable for error correction and adding images and links.

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