1 Best Practices for Textbook Draft Manuscripts
This document serves as a guide for authors preparing draft manuscripts for publication with Raider Digital Publishing.
If you have attempted to publish work that you created outside of Pressbooks (in Microsoft Word, for example), you may have had the deflating experience of importing your well formatted manuscript into Pressbooks, only to find that the document has been flattened into plain text and crammed into a single “chapter.” Whatever work you’ve done on the front end for formatting is lost, and now you have the daunting task of separating your sections out again.
This is due to the unfortunate inability of pressbooks to read all the details of an enriched text document. There are steps you can take to prevent this, however! By following these practices, the transition from Microsoft Word to Pressbooks should be a lot smoother!
Unless otherwise specified, every piece of formatting in this pressbooks book was done in the Microsoft Word document manuscript prior to importing, with very little editing done in Pressbooks itself. For reference, as you are using this guide, you can see the original document here to see what was going on behind the scenes for formatting.
Allowed Formatting
After import, all extraneous custom formatting will be stripped out of your text. This includes font choice, font color, font size, etc. Only bold and italics text, tables, hyperlinks, and headings will be preserved.
Headings
When formatting for import into Pressbooks, use Headings in the Styles menu in Word to show where a section begins and ends within a chapter.
Pressbooks will automatically make Heading 1s the titles of their own pages/chapters, with page breaks before. You should use Heading 1s only for major section/chapter titles, with Heading 2s and 3s used for subsections and subsections within a subsection, respectively.
Do not simply make text large or colorful to convey that information is important. This will not be preserved during the import process.
Tables
Unlike text, tables you create in Word will transfer with some of the formatting you applied to them. This may be a good way to make tables “pop,” but make sure you are using accessible colors! You can review your color choices online using the Color Contrast checker.
Images
For figures and other images, provide a note where the image should go, along with a caption and alternative text. The image will not be preserved during the import into Pressbooks, so formatting your manuscript this way will allow you to accurately drop in the image once you import the manuscript.[1]
We suggest something like this:
<Insert Figure 1 Here>
CAPTION: This should be something additive that relates to the text, not a description of the image. Source and license information should also be provided here, or in a linked footnote. For example: (Source: Author Name, available under a CC BY 4.0 license)
ALT TEXT: A short description (i.e. “A photo of students laughing in a courtyard”)
Using this notation, you’ll be able to go through your manuscript after it is uploaded, import the images, and attach your caption and alt text at the same time.
For more information about how to write effective alternative text, please review this Accessibility Support page from the Texas Tech Online.
Videos
To embed a video, simply provide a link to where the video is located. Pressbooks will automatically read and embed the video from the link provided. This is the simplest way to embed media. If you include the link in your manuscript, it takes a whole step out; the video will already be embedded once you upload your manuscript into Pressbooks!
Note: You can also embed videos directly into pressbooks by adding them to your book’s media library, similar to images. This is less efficient, as it can cause compatibility issues and may exceed your maximum file upload size. If at all possible, uploading your video to a dedicated video hosting site (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Kaltura) and embedding according to the instructions above is almost always a better option for including videos in your textbook.
- Since this guide is more focused on formatting before the import into Pressbooks, I won’t go into detail on how to insert an image once you’ve imported your document. For a guide on that, see Media – Pressbooks User Guide ↵
