What Do We Mean by Text Editing and “Good Markup”
Ebooks are essentially self-contained websites. As such, they are created from text wrapped in HTML and CSS styling.
To have good-looking book outputs from Pressbooks (and indeed, for any kind of ebook, whether or not you use Pressbooks), it’s critical to have good “markup.”
What Is “Markup”?
Pressbooks uses HTML (content and structure) and CSS (styling) to create ebooks, PDFs and web versions. You don’t need to know HTML or CSS to use Pressbooks, but understanding a little bit about how they work will help make sure your books look good when you export them or make them available in a catalog.
NOTE: the Visual editor in Pressbooks allows you to style things without ever knowing about markup, or seeing code or tags. But if you’ve got formatting problems with your output, 90% of the time it will be caused by “bad” underlying markup.
Are you having difficulty with formatting?
Basic Markup
Markup is the HTML part … it’s the text of your book, plus tags in the background.
For instance, here is a brief passage of text with some formatting:
This is what you might write into the VISUAL editor of Pressbooks. But if you look at the TEXT editor, you’ll see that the way that italic and bold is achieved is through “markup”, or HTML. So the markup of the above text looks like:
A long, <em>long</em> time ago,
in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a fine young man
<strong>unaware</strong> of various things about his past,
including: the Force, what his father was up to, how to use a
lightsaber. All that, however, was about to change. Three things were
about to happen: he would discover the Force, he would learn how to use a
lightsaber, and he would meet his father.The <em>tag</em> specifies that a text should be italicized. The <strong>tag</strong> specifies that it should be bold.
A reader reading a web page won’t see those tags. They are instead used to tell the browser, how those words should look.
So, what is good markup?
The main thing about markup
OK, So What Is “Good” Mark-up?
Doesn’t Pressbooks give me “good” markup without me worrying about it? Yes, although sometimes bad markup can be introduced by applying formatting incorrectly or importing documents with hidden markup from word processing software. How do I get “good” mark-up? What is the basic markup used in Pressbooks (and indeed all books)?
The example above is pretty simple, but there are other kinds of content that you might want to style in certain ways in a book. In addition to italics and bolds, there are a handful tags you should know about:
| tag name | used for | tags |
| strong | used to make text bold | <strong> or <b> |
| emphasis | used to make text italic | <em> or <i> |
| blockquote | used to quote a long text, can be used for instance for a letter, a poem etc | <blockquote> |
| unordered list | used to create a list with bullets | <ul><li>item 1</li><li>item 2</li></ul> |
| ordered list | used to create a numbered list | <ol> |
| headings | used to make headings in your document | <h1>, <h2>, <h3> ... </h6> |
Here is that same text from above with unordered and ordered list used, resulting more formatting:
The Background
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a fine young man unaware of various things about his past, including:
- the Force
- what his father was up to
- how to use a lightsaber.
All that, however, was about to change. Three things were about to happen:
- he would discover the Force
- he would learn how to use a lightsaber, and
- he would meet his father.
The Update
Long after this fellow lived, a famous movie was made about his life. The movie was shot in Tunisia.
Here is that text with markup:
<h3>The Background</h3>
A long, <em>long</em> time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,
there lived a fine young man <strong>unaware</strong> of
various things about his past, including:
<ul>
<li>the Force</li>
<li>what his father was up to</li>
<li>how to use a lightsaber.</li>
</ul>
All that, however, was about to change.
Three things were about to happen:
<ol>
<li>he would discover the Force</li>
<li>he would learn how to use a lightsaber, and</li>
<li>he would meet his father.</li>
</ol>
<h3>The Update</h3>
Long after this fellow lived, a famous movie was made about his life. The movie was shot in Tunisia.
There are many more tags that may be used.
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