Dear BCcampus Pressbooks User, 

As a Pressbooks account holder in pressbooks.bccampus.ca, you have been placed on a mailing list to receive notifications about upgrades, service outages, and other events that affect your Pressbooks account.

UPGRADE NOTICE

On Thursday, January 23, 2020, from 7 am to 10 am, Pressbooks (pressbooks.bccampus.ca) will be upgraded from version 5.6.3 to version 5.13.0. You will be unable to login to your Pressbooks account during this time. However, public access to published textbooks should not be affected.

This is a major update which will provide a number of long-awaited features and bug fixes.

Open Textbooks Theme 

With this upgrade, the Open Textbooks theme will officially be removed from pressbooks.bccampus.ca. If you have not already done so, please switch your books to one of the other themes. Clarke is the theme most similar to the Open Textbooks theme, but McLuhan is also a good option. For more information, see Retiring the Open Textbook Theme.

New Features 

• New admin colour scheme: You can now select a colour scheme that increases accessibility of the Pressbooks Admin interface. This colour scheme increases the colour contrast and underlines all links in the Pressbooks Admin interface. This will not affect the webbook or export files. To enable, navigate to your profile in Pressbooks. Under "Admin Colour Scheme" select "Pressbooks a11y." 

• Redesigned exports page: The exports page has been updated to make it easier to manage your exported files. Pressbooks will now store the last three exports of each file format. You can also now sort exports by file format, size, and date exported. You can also "pin" any files that you do not want to be deleted. 

• Progress bars: Pressbooks will now display a progress bar when importing, exporting, cloning, and generating a cover. 

• Clone h5p activities: H5P activities within books will now make it through the cloning process. 

• MathJax Support: MathJax is a JavaScript display engine that translates mathematical markup (LaTex and MathML) into high resolution, accessible equations that can render in any supported book format on Pressbooks. 

Bug Fixes and Changes: 

• The "Import" tab is no longer accessed from the Dashboard Menu. You can find it under "Tools." 

• "LO" KT" and "EX" buttons will no longer appear in Visual Editor toolbar, but those special textboxes can still be inserted from the "Textboxes" drop-down menu. 

• A number of updates to increase the accessibility of the Pressbooks admin interface, Digital PDFs, and footnotes. 

• Improvements to glossary tooltips. Definitions can now include links and bold and italic text. 

• There is a new "Publish" tab in the Dashboard Menu where you can add links to where people can purchase POD versions of a book. 

• Glossary terms will now alphabetize correctly 

• Licences on chapters in the webbook will now list the book title rather than the chapter title, unless the chapter is under a different licence or author from the rest of the book. 

• Additional table classes available from the visual editor. 

• Unnecessary alert when saving parts will no longer pop up.

 

For a full list of updates and changes, refer to the Pressbooks Release Log.

Sincerely, 

The BCcampus Open Education Team and IT Support 

BCcampus IT Support
BCcampus | Learning. Doing. Leading.
support@bccampus.ca | www.bccampus.ca