Publishing in Pressbooks

When editing in Pressbooks, you can use the visual editor or the text editor. The default is the visual editor, which uses a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) similar to word processors or blogging platforms. The text editor allows you to edit the plain text and HTML code.

The Visual Editor:

• Write and revise content
• Add and format media and content
• Structure page content, add text anchors and hyperlinks

The Text Editor:

• Clean up HTML code that might be causing formatting problems (especially if the text was copied and pasted from Microsoft Word or similar)
• Paste HTML embed codes

Pressbooks supports embedding from YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Social Media sites (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.), Flickr, and TED.com and many others.  

Footnotes can be added in the visual or text editor. No HTML encoding is needed.

In the Visual editor, use the Insert Footnote button in the editing toolbar. When the footnote button is pressed, the footnote content is added directly in line with the previous text (as opposed to the bottom of the page). 

You can also use the footnote shortcode:

Images can be uploaded either in bulk, through the Media Library from the dashboard, or individually, through the visual editor. 

Edit items' metadata individually to craft titles, captions, alternative text, and attributions. For books with a high volume of media, the attribution metadata crafted here can be automatically inserted as footnotes or endnotes. 

Image Metadata:

• Title
• Caption: Necessary to make images render properly in e-readers
• Alt-text: Can be the same as a caption, but are necessary for readers with visual impairments. Learn more about crafting alt-text.
• Description: With this optional field, you can add a lengthier description to the media you add. To make this description visible in your book, open the chapter where you have embedded the media.
  • Select the media and press Edit. 
  • Under Display Settings find Link To and select Attachment Page from the drop-down box. Now, when users click the image, they will be able to view the description on a separate page.

In Pressbooks, users interact with media as they encounter it in the sections of your book. They cannot view your media library.

To embed media in a section, navigate to the Edit Chapter screen by selecting Organize from the side navigation.

The organize menu provides an overview of the entire book as it stands—front matter, main body, and backmatter and allows you to edit, delete, or add sections of your book. To add media to a chapter, add a new chapter or select an existing one to edit.

At the top of the visual editor, find the Add Media button.

Items from your media library will appear automatically with the associated metadata. If you wish, you may edit the metadata from this screen. You may also upload new files, insert media from a URL, or insert multiple items at a time to create a gallery.

Pressbooks can handle audio and video, but as the file upload size is limited, you may have to rely on external hosts like Youtube or Vimeo and embedding them with the text editor.

From the Insert Media dialog box, you can choose how you want to the image to look on the page in terms of alignment and size. When you are finished, select Insert.

At any time, you can go back and edit by selecting the image on the page and pressing the Edit button. You can even replace the original image file while retaining the metadata.

Some of the content on this page was adapted from the Pressbooks User Guide by Book Oven Inc. CC-BY 4.0.