Getting Started

Adding Media

Using Media

If you are a member of faculty at the University of West Florida are having trouble using Pressbooks or need assistance with other publishing resources, you can contact the UWF Library Coordinator of Scholarly Communication. 

For more information, visit Scholarly Communication Guide or email us at pressbooks-group@uwf.edu

The Visual & Text Editors

When editing in Pressbooks, you can use the visual editor or the text editor. The default is the visual editor, which uses a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) similar to word processors or blogging platforms. The text editor allows you to edit the plain text and HTML code.

The Visual Editor:

• Write and revise content
• Add and format media and content
• Structure page content, add text anchors and hyperlinks

The Text Editor:

• Clean up HTML code that might be causing formatting problems (especially if the text was copied and pasted from Microsoft Word or similar)
• Paste HTML embed codes

Pressbooks supports embedding from YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Social Media sites (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.), Flickr, and TED.com and many others.  

Images can be uploaded either in bulk, through the Media Library from the dashboard, or individually, through the visual editor. 

Edit items' metadata individually to craft titles, captions, alternative text, and attributions. For books with a high volume of media, the attribution metadata crafted here can be automatically inserted as footnotes or endnotes. 

In Pressbooks, users interact with media as they encounter it in the sections of your book. They cannot view your media library. To embed media in a section, navigate to the Edit Chapter screen by selecting Organize from the side navigation.

The organize menu provides an overview of the entire book as it stands—front matter, main body, and backmatter and allows you to edit, delete, or add sections of your book. To add media to a chapter, add a new chapter or select an existing one to edit.

At the top of the visual editor, find the Add Media button.

Items from your media library will appear automatically with the associated metadata. If you wish, you may edit the metadata from this screen. You may also upload new files, insert media from a URL, or insert multiple items at a time to create a gallery.

Pressbooks can handle audio and video, but as the file upload size is limited, you may have to rely on external hosts like Youtube or Vimeo and embedding them with the text editor.

The following resources will help with planning your Pressbook...

Open Textbook Publishing: Pub 101

• Parts of a textbook
• Developing a textbook structure
• Working with authors to develop textbook structure
• Pedagogical elements

EDUTECH Wiki: Textbook writing tutorial

Modifying an Open Textbook