11 Weird Pressbooks Tips
This section is just here for me to make notes as I go along. You can ignore it unless you are trying to create your own PressBook.
Don’t miss the next/previous/top browsing buttons in the bottom border of the browser page. The small text on a dark border can make them less than obvious. Also be sure to check out the revision history that makes it easy to review and/or roll back changes.
Formatting Glitches
Copying from the visual editor and pasting changes some of the underlying code. Backslashes will disappear, which will break the latex commands in your equations, and any escape sequences you put in, for example to include dollar signs. It will also change simple https: addresses for youTube videos (what you get when you paste from the browser window) into html links with anchors.
Bolding type doesn’t work in lists
- Bolding type doesn’t work in lists
You can’t include images from another site
unless maybe it is another pressbooks site…
and then you will need to edit attributes in the HTML directly if you want to change the size. You can’t include an image from a github repo https://github.com/sellensr/Tiny-House/blob/master/Mar29%20ON%20Elec.jpg except as a link.
Media files don’t auto update
Changing the caption in the media library doesn’t seem to have any effect on the caption where you already inserted the media into the book. You need to re-insert after updating.
Formatting Computer Code in your book
Select multiple lines and use the preformatted format instead of heading or paragraph to manage multiple lines of code. If you select all the way to the end of the last line, preformatted will extend to the next paragraph, so select carefully.
Use the open single quote character
(reverse of an apostrophe, lower case of ~ in the top left of most keyboards) or this is code
pressbooks code, /code shortcode tags with square brackets to enclose text and get the same effect inside a paragraph. The code tag doesn’t behave gracefully across line breaks.
Units and Spacing
Enclosing something like C_p = 4180\;\rm J/kgK in $ signs on a latexpage will produce and avoid breaking across the end of a line, however it won’t include other text styling like bold in the latex portion.
In lines like this you can introduce a non breaking space by switching to text mode editing and adding at the appropriate location. There’s one of those between the number and the J. The weird part is it will disappear by next time you switch from visual to text mode, but the effect will remain.
Burning a coffee cup full of propane will produce heat release of about 8000000 J.
Building in your own LaTeX commands
Under Settings/QuickLaTeX/Advanced you can include new components to the LaTeX preamble, like this one
\newcommand{\kelvin}{\ensuremath{^\circ\,\textrm{K}}}
that makes a degrees Kelvin unit after a number in math mode. Like this . Or this one to do units
\newcommand{\units}[1]{{\rule{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\rm\,{#1}}}
This is an example and here’s another