Open Educational Resources Collective Publishing Workflow

As in WordPress, you can use a template or ‘theme’ to style your OER. This theme will be applied to your webbook and your EPUB and PDF exports. Themes include styling rules for all elements of your OER, including:

• chapter title designs
• fonts for heading and body text
• the appearance of textboxes
• block quotes
• lists
• tables export-specific elements like
  • title page layout
  • copyright page layout
  • running content.

Pressbooks has around 20 different themes. When you create a new OER, 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:

• Academic
• Literary
• Nonfiction
• Textbook
• Genre fiction.

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:

• Andreesen
• Bradbury
• Clarke
• Donham
• Graham
• Jacobs
• Lewis
• McLuhan.

• Asimov
• Baker
• Bradbury
• Clarke
• Dillard
• Graham
• Luther
• Lewis.

You can customise the appearance and functionality of your OER in Theme Options.

Theme Options are split into four sections:

• Global Options – affect the appearance of all book formats, including your webbook, ebook and PDF
• Web Options – only affect the appearance of your webbook
• PDF Options – affect the appearance of your print and digital PDF exports
• Ebook Options – affect the appearance of your EPUB ebook exports.

If the changes you want to make aren’t available in Theme Options, you can further customise your OER 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 OER:

• Web – affects the appearance of your webbook
• Ebook – affects the appearance of your EPUB ebook exports
• PDF – affects the appearance of your print and digital PDF exports.

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.