The Authoring Dashboard
Appearance
The Appearance menu allows you to make choices that affect how your webbook and export files look. In this chapter we will cover:
Selecting Your Book Theme
Themes are the base of the design for your book. Pressbooks offers dozens of different themes, tailor-made to suit a wide array of specific genres. Themes include styling rules for all of the elements of your book, including chapter title designs, fonts for heading and body text, the appearance of textboxes, block quotes, lists, tables, and export-specific elements like title page layout, copyright page layout, running content, and much more. The theme you choose will be applied to your webbook and your EPUB and PDF exports.
When you first create a book, a theme will already have been applied to the book. For most networks, the default theme is McLuhan. To change your book’s theme:
- Click Appearance > Themes in the left sidebar menu.
- Click the Activate button for your desired theme
- Upon activate, the Theme page will reload, and will see a “New theme activated” notification. Your webbook and any subsequently produced export files will reflect the theme you have selected.
Viewing Theme Details: Before activating a theme, you may want to know more about it. You can hover over any theme on the Themes page and click the Theme Details button to see more information about the theme. This will include details about the theme, the version number of the theme installed on your network, and any tags which have been used to categorize the type of publications the theme was designed for.
Searching for Themes: Each theme has been tagged with one or more of the following searchable tags:
- Academic
- Literary
- Nonfiction
- Textbook
- Genre fiction
These tags represent the kind of work for which a particular this theme is best suited. For example, the “genre fiction” tag include theme designs that work well for romance novels, thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, or science fiction. You can use the Search function at the top of the Themes page to find themes tagged with your preferred term(s). For example, try searching “academic” to see all the themes that were designed with academic texts in mind.
Theme Options
While every theme is equipped with sensible defaults, you can customize the way that your book looks on any theme with additional Theme Options. To access the Theme Options settings, go to Appearance > Theme Options from the left sidebar menu of your book’s dashboard.
Theme Options are split into four sections:
- Global Options
- Web Options
- PDF Options
- Ebook Options
Global Options
Global Theme Options are settings that will affect the display of all book formats, including your webbook, ebook, and PDF. Below are the settings currently available as Global Theme Options on updated themes.
Part and Chapter Numbers: Enable or disable the display of part and chapter numbers in all formats. Enabling this setting serves as an alternative to choosing Chapter Type “Numb