Create Your Epub Ebooks with Sigil Ebook Editor

When you start writing an ebook, you can use all sorts of editors for that task. From good old – and plain – Notepad to Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer. Sigil’s main advantage over those editors is its focus on ebooks. The program is a free, open source editor for EPUB format ebooks. It offers a what you see is what you get interface (WYSIWIG), as well as advanced features such as support for XHTML, CSS and XPGT editing.

The main interface includes a toolbar at the top, a book browser on the left, a tabbed editing interface in the middle and if enabled, table of contents on the right.

The basic idea is to use the left sidebar to create and move between chapters. These are crated easily with a click on File > New > Blank Section or by using the split chapter shortcut Ctrl-Return.

The editor works like any rich text editor you come across. You can start adding text immediately to it, use formatting options, define headings or insert images for instances right away. Advanced users can switch to a dual view mode that displays the underlying code in a split editor window, or a pure code editor window which may appeal to users who want to add contents in the code right away.

Sigil can create a table of contents for the newly created ebook automatically. The ebook editor analyzes the headings and uses that structure to create the table of contents. Headings are easily created either directly in code, or with a click on the headings pulldown menu of the toolbar.

Ebooks can be validated with a click on File > Validate Epub which may be helpful before the book is saved and distributed. Books are automatically saved in the epub format.

Sigil supports keyboard shortcuts for most operations, and dictionary files for spell checking.

The ebook editor is an easy to use yet complex enough program for aspiring authors who would like to create books in epub format. The software is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh systems at the project’s Google Code web page.

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Manage Ebook Collections With Calibre About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday February 26, 2012 -
Tags:ebook, linux software, mac software, windows software

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Wikipedia Visual Editor Coming Soon

One of the biggest hurdles for new Wikipedia contributors is the editor that is currently offered on site. The editor is basically a plain text editor and authors have to learn the markup language to add, edit or delete information on Wikipedia pages. While it is often possible to use copy and paste for that, for instance to add a new link to a Wikipedia article, the syntax is often not that easy to cope with, especially if you plan on adding a new article to the site.

Howie Fung, Senior Product Manager, notes that there “is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects”.

That’s without doubt one of the core reasons why the Wikimedia Foundation has started to create a visual editor for Wikipedia. The editor is currently available as a developer prototype. The editor is nowhere near as robust to make it available for all Wikipedia editors just yet, but it shows some of the editor’s planned capabilities.

The developers have published a visual editor sandbox to provide all contributing and future editors with the opportunity to test the visual editor before it goes live on the site. When you open the editor sandbox, you see a single toolbar at the top and the article beneath. Everything on that page is editable.

The first half of the toolbar provides access to common editor options, like adding headings to the article, making text bold or adding links to it. The second half switches between different view modes. It is for instance possible to display a wikitext or json view mode next to the editor’s text. Strangely though, those view modes do not allow editing of contents.

The developers plan to add features and upgrade the editor to make it more robust before it goes live later this year on the site. A visual editor could increase the editor count on Wikipedia significantly. What’s your take on the move?

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday February 24, 2012 -
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YouTube Browse, Video Editor And Manager Updated

While closing some of the company’s lesser popular services, Google’s popular services such as Google+ or YouTube have received plenty of updates in the past. Google today announced that they have updated YouTube’s browse, video editor and video manager pages. Channels have moved into the focus on YouTube with recent updates, and the new browse pages reflects that. According to Google the updated page helps users “find even more great Channels on YouTube”.

The new browse page on YouTube divides contents into categories on the left side. You can now browse categories like gaming, science and technology, or sports more easily. Each page displays the most viewed videos at the top followed by popular videos and select channels

Here is is then possible to click on a specific video to watch that video on YouTube, or on a channel name to open that channel on the website. YouTube users and companies listed on the pages should benefit highly from the new exposure.

YouTube has improved the capabilities and look and feel of the site’s video editor. The video editor has received a visual overhaul, a “cool new timeline, easier clip trimming and a moving playhead”.

One interesting feature that is now available is the ability to join multiple uploaded videos into one. This is done by dragging and dropping the videos on the timeline. The video editor is a useful tool for basic or last minute video editing. On the downside, it does not come close to the functionality that desktop applications like VirtualDub provide.

Last December’s update of the Video Manager did not play well with many YouTube content producers. The new video manager resolves some of the issues that users had with the update. Likes and dislike statistics have for instance been re-added to the manager interface. Sorting videos by popularity has also returned.

The video manager furthermore has received a visual update, an improved “display of scheduled uploads and claimed videos”, and a search history.

You can read the announcement over at the official YouTube blog.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday January 27, 2012 -
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Free Video Dub Is A Quick Basic Video Editor

I sometimes have to edit or convert videos before I upload them to YouTube or save them to a backup server. This is for instance the case for gaming session recordings which often reach the 100 Gigabyte mark and beyond. Tools like Virtualdub or Avidemux are advanced tools that I use most of the time, especially when videos need to be re-encoded to save disk space.

Sometimes though I only have to make smaller adjustments to a video, for instance if I have to cut part of the video from the recording. While I could use the two programs mentioned above, I often prefer to run a simpler tool to accomplish those jobs.

Free Video Dub is a free basic video editing software for the Windows operating system. When you first start it up you are asked to pick a source video file that is stored on the machine. The program supports a variety of input video formats, from avi and flv to mov, m3v and mpg.

The video is then automatically loaded, and you have the usual playback controls that include stop, pause and a slider to go to a specific position.

The application can only be used to cut videos. This is done either by selecting the starting and end locations manually or by letting the program pick them automatically. If you select the manual option, you can either delete the part that you have selected or save it to the computer system. Deleted parts are removed from the video, and the video is again joined together. This means it can also be useful to remove advertisements from videos.

You can delete multiple parts of the loaded video one after the other with options to undo or redo processes when necessary.

Free Video Dub has an option that allows you to detect new scenes automatically to aid in the cutting process. Advanced users can furthermore use shortcuts to speed up the processing further.

Windows users who need to cut supported video files regularly may like the basic nature of the cutting software. The software is compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed on the system it is run on. Please note that the program will install a toolbar on the PC if you do not pay attention to the installation dialog.

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Free Video to DVD Converter About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday January 12, 2012 -
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