[Plugin] Epub3 E-Reader Plugins for Sigil

[KevinH]

To help user's get a better feel for how their epubs will look in some browser-based epub2/epub3 e-readers while still inside Sigil, we have created 3 new Reader plugins for Sigil 1.6.0 or later:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/ReadiumReader/
- based on Readium's cloud e-reader

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/BibiReader/
- based on Bibi browser e-reader

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/EpubJSReader/
- based on FuturePress's epubJS e-reader

For direct links to the plugin's themselves, see the Plugin Index
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=247431

These plugins will only work Sigil-1.6.0 or later.

[BeckyEbook]

Icons for BibiReader and EpubJSReader.

For Bibi, it is the Japanese "Bi" character.

[KevinH]

Thank you! I will add then to the next releases.

[RbnJrg]

When I run any of the three plugins, I get the following message:

Status: failed
Launcher: missing or incorrect paths passed in.

What can be wrong? I tried with both, epub2 and epub3 ebooks. And the plugins are installed where they are suppossed must be:

(C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Local\sigil-ebook\sigil\plugins).

TIA
Rubén

EDIT: My bad; files were corrupted. After redownloading the plugins all worked perfectly.
Many thanks for your great work!

[odamizu]

I had some weirdness occur when adding and running the plugins as well. But I can't quite the remember the sequence.

I think first I tried to add all 3 plugins, one at a time, but after adding 2 (Bibi and epubJS), Sigil froze. Totally unresponsive. I ended up having to Force Quit Sigil (command-option-escape).

Then I re-launched Sigil and successfully added the 3 plugins (using the same plugin files that I originally downloaded). When I ran Bibi, I got Status failed: Launcher missing or incorrect paths passed in message, but the other two ran successfully.

I quit Sigil and re-launched, and then everything ran smoothly. The plugins weren't corrupted since I never re-downloaded them, just used the same plugin file from the original download.

I realize this probably isn't helpful since I don't have exact sequence and can't reproduce the problem. Just wanted to inform that I experienced some weirdness when adding the plugins and on first-run, but it all worked itself out with quitting and re-launching Sigil.

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

When I run any of the three plugins, I get the following message:

Status: failed
Launcher: missing or incorrect paths passed in.

What can be wrong? I tried with both, epub2 and epub3 ebooks. And the plugins are installed where they are suppossed must be:

(C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Local\sigil-ebook\sigil\plugins).

TIA
Rubén

EDIT: My bad; files were corrupted. After redownloading the plugins all worked perfectly.
Many thanks for your great work!

[DiapDealer]

Curious. Do you know if you added the plugins using the Plugins->Manage Plugins menu route, or did you do the Edit->Preferences menu route and then navigate to the Plugin subpreference?

There's some subtle internal differences in the methods. I'd recommend the first to avoid having to refresh the plugin database with a Sigil restart. Though I can't think offhand why these particular plugins would cause issues in that regard.

[KevinH]

On macOS you must download them and then manually move each one outside of your Downloads folder to your Desktop to get Gatekeeper to not try to move them for security purposes.

It is not the plugin itself that is generating that error message, it is the Sigil plugin wrapper code. It will report exactly that error if the plugin you are trying to launch is being secretly moved behind the scenes when run the first time due to Gatekeeper.

My guess is Gatekeeper is also playing around behind the scenes with Sigil too when it is run the first time after installation.

Not sure why it happens on Windows though?

[DNSB]

For what it is worth, I installed the 3 plugins from the Plugins => Manage Plugins and added them to my Plugins shortcut bar. The BiBiReader plugin was very slow loading the 453 xhtml files from an anthology I used for testing and was not the speediest at turning pages. The BibiReader plugin also display a portion of the next page if I set the windows width too much wider than the text column on a couple of occasions.

It was rather interesting to see the difference in how they displayed the book I was testing compared to preview and PageEdit.

This is on Windows 10 Pro x64.

[KevinH]

Yes, Bibi requires you give it a zipped epub whereas none of the others have that requirement.

So for Bibi the plugin must copy each file in the epub and zip it up just to pass it to Bibi.

Bibi's strength is supposed to be rtl and vertical layouts. I have no epubs to test that with.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Curious. Do you know if you added the plugins using the Plugins->Manage Plugins menu route, or did you do the Edit->Preferences menu route and then navigate to the Plugin subpreference?

Plugins > Manage Plugins

Originally Posted by KevinH

On macOS you must download them and then manually move each one outside of your Downloads folder to your Desktop to get Gatekeeper to not try to move them for security purposes.

Yes, I did that.

My guess is Gatekeeper is also playing around behind the scenes with Sigil too when it is run the first time after installation.

Yes, since it only happened the first-run, that makes sense. Weirdness!

[RbnJrg]

Sometimes, when I want to see how the hyphens could affect a text (and when to avoid them or where disable them), I use the lybrary Hyphenator.js. Sigil supports it very well (even in epub2) and the Preview panel shows hyphens very well.

Of course, I don't include in my epubs (even in epub3) the .js lybrary (because epub2 doesn't support it and for epub3, the ereaders have the feature to hyphen the text) but for that very reason, it's quite a nuisance first to add the lybrary to watch the probably output and then remove it.

But now, that you Kevin and Diap have implemented three plugins as viewers, I'm wondering if wouldn't be possible add the Hyphenator.js lybrary to them (the user could have the option to enable or disable it). By the way, BibiReader seems not to support javascripts.

Many thanks for your considerations.

[DiapDealer]

Kevin would be able to provide more detailed info here, but we're really not doing much of anything other than providing a browser for these totally standalone reading systems to run in. We're not looking to reinvent the wheel by doing a lot of hacking in these separate projects' codebases. We're just basically providing a wrapper for their reading systems to inhabit. A lot of customization will make it more difficult for us to incorporate any upstream changes from those external projects.

That's not to say Kevin might not be more amenable to customizations of this sort. I wouldn't want to speak for him.

[KevinH]

Bibi currently disables user javascript in its default setting but I can change that in a future release.

As DiapDealer said, we are *NOT* trying to create our own e-reader here at all.

We are just packaging up existing browser based e-readers so the epub developers can see how their code might work across multiple e-readers while still inside Sigil where changes can be made more easily.

[KevinH]

If you want to play around with Bibi and javscripts, you will need to search the bibi folder inside the plugin for a file called defaults.js.

Here is a link to it on github:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/BibiR...ets/default.js

Near the end of that file you will see:

/* !!!! BE CAREFUL !!!! */ "allow-scripts-in-content" : false, // true or false (false is recommended).
// If you change its value `true`, Bibi does not remove scripts natively-included in EPUB.
// It makes Bibi to be able to open EPUBs including useful scripts.
// But on the other hand, it may also allow XSS of malicious EPUB in some cases.

There are other settings in that file that control what happens when you grow the window too wide and many other useful things.

Changing that file in the plugin should allow you to use your hyphenator and control layout a bit better.

Hope this helps.

KevinH

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Sometimes, when I want to see how the hyphens could affect a text (and when to avoid them or where disable them), I use the lybrary Hyphenator.js. Sigil supports it very well (even in epub2) and the Preview panel shows hyphens very well.

Of course, I don't include in my epubs (even in epub3) the .js lybrary (because epub2 doesn't support it and for epub3, the ereaders have the feature to hyphen the text) but for that very reason, it's quite a nuisance first to add the lybrary to watch the probably output and then remove it.

But now, that you Kevin and Diap have implemented three plugins as viewers, I'm wondering if wouldn't be possible add the Hyphenator.js lybrary to them (the user could have the option to enable or disable it). By the way, BibiReader seems not to support javascripts.

Many thanks for your considerations.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by KevinH

If you want to play around with Bibi and javscripts, you will need to search the bibi folder inside the plugin for a file called defaults.js.

Here is a link to it on github:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/BibiR...ets/default.js

Near the end of that file you will see:

/* !!!! BE CAREFUL !!!! */ "allow-scripts-in-content" : false, // true or false (false is recommended).
// If you change its value `true`, Bibi does not remove scripts natively-included in EPUB.
// It makes Bibi to be able to open EPUBs including useful scripts.
// But on the other hand, it may also allow XSS of malicious EPUB in some cases.

There are other settings in that file that control what happens when you grow the window too wide and many other useful things.

Changing that file in the plugin should allow you to use your hyphenator and control layout a bit better.

Hope this helps.

KevinH

Thanks!