As in WordPress, you can use a template or ‘theme’ to style your textbook. This theme will be applied to your webbook and your EPUB and PDF exports. Themes include styling rules for all elements of your textbook, including:
Pressbooks has around 20 different themes. When you create a new book, Pressbooks applies the default theme (McLuhan) until you manually select a different theme.
Pressbooks has tagged each theme with one or more of the following searchable tags:
These tags represent the kind of book a particular theme is best suited for. You can use the search function at the top of the Themes page to find themes tagged with your preferred term(s). Searching ‘academic’ will show you all the themes that were designed with academic texts in mind.
Some examples of themes designed for academic and educational texts:
You can customise the appearance and functionality of your textbook in Theme Options.
Theme Options are split into four sections:
If the changes you want to make aren’t available in Theme Options, you can further customise your textbook by using Custom Styles to apply CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) rules to your webbook, ebook and/or PDF exports.
Similar to Theme Options, Custom Styles allows you to edit three separate stylesheets for your textbook:
Adapted from:
‘Appearance’ in Pressbooks User Guide by Pressbooks, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
‘Workflows in Pressbooks’ in Open Textbook Publishing Orientation (PUB 101) by Open Education Network, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
‘The Dashboard’ in BCcampus Open Education Pressbooks Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
‘Themes for Academic and Educational Texts’ in Pressbooks User Guide by Book Oven Inc. (Pressbooks.com), is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.