Use the Editor
Edit Content with the Visual and Text Editors
The Pressbooks editor provides you with two different views for your content. The default Visual Editor displays your content much like a word processor with much of the styling and formatting applied. The Text Editor on the other hand displays the full HTML structure of your content without any formatting visible. You can switch between the two views, depending on your needs.
Use the Visual Editor
When you create a new chapter, you will start out in the Visual Editor by default. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view that allows you to see most styling and formatting as they are applied.
Visual toolbar options
The visual editor toolbar displays the formatting options.
Top row from left to right:
- Paragraph styles dropdown menu: choose from normal paragraph style, six different heading styles, or preformatted text
- Bold
- Italic
- Bulleted (unordered) list
- Numbered (ordered) list
- Blockquote
- Align left
- Align centre
- Align right
- Insert/edit link
- Insert Read More tag
- Toolbar Toggle
- Distraction-free writing mode
Second row from left to right:
- Formats: dropdown menu to choose from several text indent and tracking options, as well as pullquote options and text direction
- Textboxes: dropdown menu to choose from a variety of plain textboxes or predesign educational textboxes (read more here)
- Underline
Strikethrough- Horizontal line
- Justify (Shift + Alt + J)
- Text color
- Background color
- Paste as text
- Clear formatting
- Special character
- Decrease indent
- Increase indent
- Undo
- Redo
- Keyboard Shortcuts
Bottom row from left to right:
- Table (read more here)
- Apply Class
- Anchor
- Superscript
- Subscript
Code
- Insert Footnote[1]
- Convert MS Word footnotes
- Insert LaTeX
- 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 formatted content.
Use the Text Editor
You can also choose to work in a text editor, or switch to it as needed (to clean up messy HTML for example). The text editor allows you to directly view and edit your book’s HTML content as HTML.
Text Editor Options
The text editor toolbar formatting options are tailored to working in HTML.
- Bold: inserts
<strong>
tags (click once to open, and again to close the tag) - Italic: inserts
<em>
tags (click once to open, and again to close the tag) - Insert link (a pop up will appear)
- Blockquote: inserts
<blockquote>
tags (click once to open, and again to close the tag) - Deleted text (strikethrough): inserts
<del>
tags (click once to open, and again to close the tag) - Inserted text: Insert a tag to display the current date and time
- Insert image (from URL)
- Bulleted list: insert
<ul>
(unordered list) tags (click once to open, and again to close the tag) - Numbered list: insert
<ol>
(ordered list) tags (click once to open, and again to close th