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7 Editing with Pressbooks

To get started editing your book in Pressbooks, it may be best to understand the two editing screens in Pressbooks and how they function. This section will help get you acquainted with the two different types of editors you will find in Pressbooks: the visual editor and the code editor. Both editors function like your common word processor with a variety of toolbar options. The following section will go into more detail about what these toolbar features are and how you can use them.

Visual Editor

The visual editor is the default editor. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface that allows you to see styling and formatting as they are applied.

This interface also includes a toolbar at the top of the editor. Below is a guide to each of the toolbar functions, and where you’ll find them.

Image of the toolbar in the visual editor in Pressbooks, with numbers above each item in the toolbar corresponding with the list below of all the items in the toolbar.
Figure 1. The Visual Editor toolbar in Pressbooks.

Toolbar options:

  1. Paragraph styles dropdown menu. Choose from normal paragraph style, six different heading styles, or preformatted text
  2. Bold
  3. Italic
  4. Bulleted list
  5. Numbered list
  6. Blockquote
  7. Align left
  8. Align center
  9. Align right
  10. Insert/edit link
  11. Insert Read More tag
  12. Toolbar Toggle
  13. Distraction-free writing mode
  14. Formats dropdown menu. Choose from several indent, tracking, and pullquote options
  15. Textboxes dropdown menu. Choose from a variety of plain textboxes or predesigned educational textboxes
  16. Underline
  17. Strikethrough
  18. Horizontal line
  19. Justify
  20. Text color
  21. Text background color
  22. Paste as text
  23. Clear formatting
  24. Special character
  25. Decrease indent
  26. Increase indent
  27. Undo and redo
  28. Keyboard shortcuts
  29. Table
  30. Apply class
  31. Anchor
  32. Superscript
  33. Subscript
  34. Code
  35. Insert footnote
  36. Convert MS Word footnotes
  37. Insert LaTeX
  38. Insert glossary term

You can highlight a section of existing content and then click a tool on the toolbar to add formatting to that section. Alternatively, select the tool first, and then add new content.

Code Editor

As an alternative to the visual editor, you can also work in a code editor, or switch to it as necessary for specific needs. Here, you can view and edit the HTML version of any text written and formatted in the visual editor, and you can also write directly in HTML, using the toolbar as necessary.

Image of the toolbar in the code editor in Pressbooks. There are numbers below each item in the toolbar that correspond with the list of items in the toolbar.
Figure 2. The Code Editor toolbar in Pressbooks.

The code editor toolbar offers fewer options, tailored to working in HTML. They are detailed below:

  1. b – Open and close <strong> tags to make text bold (click once to open and again to close the tag)
  2. i – Open and close <em> tags to make text italicized
  3. link – Link text (a pop up will appear)
  4. b-quote – Insert the blockquote tags
  5. del – Strikethrough text (also adds a date and time marker)
  6. ins – Insert a date/time tag
  7. img – Insert an image (from URL)
  8. ul – Insert a bulleted list
  9. ol – Insert a numbered list
  10. li – Add list item
  11. code – Open and close <code> tags, to style text as code
  12. more – Insert a ‘Read More’ tag (beta)
  13. close tags – Close tags (automatically closes any open tags)
  14. fn – Open and close footnote shortcode
  15. Distraction-free writing mode

 

This chapter is adapted from the Pressbooks User Guide, Chapter 24: Visual & Text Editors, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

License

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Getting Started with Open Educational Resources Copyright © 2019 by Mahrya Burnett, Jenay Solomon, Heather Healy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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