The Tools and Settings sections of the Pressbooks dashboard let you customize various elements on your book’s back end.
This section of the guide will explain:
- Why you would want to use these tools
- Exactly what they do
Tools Menu Options
Under Tools, you will find two menu items that may be useful to you:
Import
With the Import menu, you can import your manuscript into Pressbooks in one step. (Note: Unless you have a document that was prepared using Styles not formatting in your word processor, we strongly recommend you cut and paste your book chapter by chapter rather than the one-click import.) For detailed instructions on importing your document from the most common file types, see these Guide chapters:
- https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/import-from-word-docx/
- https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/import-from-wordpress/
Search & Replace
Search and Replace lets you search for a word throughout your entire book.
Warnings:
- There is no instant way to undo a global search and replace. However, you can always revert to the most recent version of each chapter using the revision history.
- The “replace” part of search and replace is temperamental and should not be relied upon. We’re currently looking into solutions.
Settings Menu Options
The settings menu houses five functions that may be useful at different times:
Sharing & Privacy
In Sharing & Privacy, you can control:
- Global privacy settings for your book (also controllable in the “Text/Organize” screen)
- Public: The web version of the book is publicly accessible to readers, though you can set each chapter’s privacy setting individually, if you like.
- Private: Only users you invite can see your book, regardless of individual chapter privacy settings.
- Who can see private front matter, chapters and back matter (just editors and administrators or all users)
- Global comment permissions (disabled by default)
Export
EPUB files must be “valid” if you want them to get into ebook stores. This means there are no coding mistakes in the output. While Pressbooks is built to produce valid EPUBs, you might have put in some code (for instance copied from a Word file) that breaks your EPUB.
Pressbooks automatically validates all EPUBs it produces, and will give you a warning if there is a problem with the export.
You can get the details of problems with your EPUB by selecting “Yes. Send the logs” in this section. This will send technical details of problems to the email address associated with your Pressbooks account.
Other ways to check problems with your file include:
- IDPF’s (free) EPUB Validator: validator.idpf.org/
- Ebook Flightdeck (not free): ebookflightdeck.com
Akismet
Akismet will let you set the strength of your spam filter.
Hypothesis
Under your Hypothesis settings you can enable or disable Hypothesis annotations on different parts of your webbook. For more about Hypothesis, see the full guide chapter.
Google Analytics
Under Google Analytics you can integrate your web book with Google analytics. This is helpful if you have made your book public and invited people to read part or all of it. Integrating with Google Analytics will tell you how many people are visiting your public web book or chapters.
PB LaTeX
PB LaTeX allows you to use the powerful mathematics equation notation built into LaTeX. Using this feature will generate an image of the equation and insert it into your book. As stated in this feature, you generate the correct output by wrapping your LaTeX code in shortcode, as follows:
<div class="textbox">
[latex]e^{i pi} + 1 = 0
should render (in all outputs) as:
As always, if you have questions or need help with any of these features, email support@pressbooks.com.