I am currently working with a team that has approximately 7 books’ worth of content they want to move from a website to Pressbooks. They have a staff member converting their files to Word for import, including formatting footnotes with shortcodes and making sure that LaTeX has an appropriate wrapper for formatting in MathJax ($latex math$ instead of $ math$).
These resources currently contain glossary terms that the team would like imported into Pressbooks with their text instead of having to manually add them. Is there a shortcode or custom CSS anyone has developed that they could use to simplify this process? I see that there is an optional Plugin (Pressbooks Shortcode Handler) to enable shortcodes from Lumen Learning, and I’m hoping that might be a good avenue to explore?
Hi Abbey,
I don’t have an easy fix to suggest, but I have done some similar edits to texts coming into Pressbooks. The Search & Replace function was really helpful to me for finding HTML coded footnotes and replacing them with the footnote shortcode (using regular expressions–happy to provide examples if you are interested). I still had to manually paste in the content of the footnotes in that case, but it removed the step of manually inserting the footnote code. You can also do similar find/changes in a text editor to the HTML prior to conversion to Word/upload to PB.
For the glossary I think it would be more complicated because the definitions are technically a post-type in Pressbooks, but you could theoretically download a Pressbooks XML back up and use that as a template for coding the glossary definitions to then reupload it to the site rather than having to manually go in and create entries for each term.
Then tagging the terms within the textbook with some sort of find/change would be difficult unless each term already had a unique identifier associated with it–in that case you could maybe take that identifier and code it into the XML so that the tagged terms are linked with the correct definition, if that makes sense.
Anyway, sorry I don’t have an actual code or plugin to help–this is just the kind of troubleshooting I love doing (and I totally empathize with you needing to automate some of this with so many books to convert!). Happy to elaborate on any of this if it seems promising/helpful.
I know I’m very late to this, but for future reference you can eliminate your footnote work when importing Word docs. Convert Footnotes from Imported Documents Saves a LOT of work if there’s a lot of footnotes.