Retiring the Open Textbooks theme in Pressbooks
by BCcampus IT Support
Dear Pressbooks User,
After much discussion and consideration, we have decided to retire the Open Textbooks theme available in Pressbooks. While this change won't occur for several weeks, we do ask that book administrators switch their open textbooks in pressbooks.bccampus.ca to one of the other available themes in preparation for this change. By switching in advance, you will have the opportunity to review how the new theme affects your book and fix/report any issues that you find. If you do not switch in advance of the change , your books will be switched automatically to the McLuhan theme when the Open Textbook theme is retired.
How to change your book's theme
To change your book's theme, click the Appearance tab in the Dashboard menu. Under "Themes," you will be able to select the theme you would like to switch to. We recommend switching to McLuhan, Clarke, or Jacobs . You will have to do this for each book that you are the Administrator for. If you need more assistance, watch this: Select a Theme video tutorial
What is a theme?
In Pressbooks, a theme is a set of styles that can be applied to the entirety of a book. A theme will determine things like font type and size, textbox colours, appearance of headings, and line spacing in all export formats. By default, when you create a new book in Pressbooks, that book will use the Open Textbooks theme, but there are a number of different themes to choose from.
What does this mean for my book(s)?
Changing the theme of your book will affect the style of your book (font, link colours, text size, textbox colours, etc) and possibly t he number of pages in the PDF, but the content and structure should remain as-is . Once you change the theme, the webbook will be updated with the new styles. Your exports will only reflect the change after you export a new copy of those files with the new theme applied.
If you do not want the new theme applied to your exported book files, do not re-export the files for your book.
Context for this decision
BCcampus built the Open Textbooks plugin at the beginning of the open textbook project to expand the Pressbooks authoring platform to include features that specifically support textbook authoring, such as the key takeaways and exercise textboxes . Over the last few years, as Pressbooks has been adopted by more and more institutions wanting to publish open textbooks, those features have been incorporated as features directly supported by Pressbooks. As such, the Open Textbook plugin (aka theme) currently acts more like a collection of styles, rather than a plugin that enables textbook-publishing functionalities that wouldn't exist otherwise. In addition, it requires a considerable amount of maintenance to be compatible with new Pressbooks updates that are happening all the time, which slows down our ability to keep our Pressbooks instance up to date.
Sincerely,
The BCcampus Open Education Team and IT Support
5 years, 9 months
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