Hi Pressbooks team and community,
At our institution, we recently developed an enhancement for Pressbooks to make the numbering of Book Parts and Chapters more flexible.
Currently, Pressbooks supports:
- Book Parts: Roman numerals (uppercase) — I, II, III
- Chapters: Arabic numerals — 1, 2, 3
These formats are fixed and cannot be changed.
We added support for multiple additional numbering styles.
Authors can now choose from:
- Roman numerals (uppercase) – I, II, III
- Roman numerals (lowercase) – i, ii, iii
- Alphabetical (uppercase) – A, B, C
- Alphabetical (lowercase) – a, b, c
- Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3
This makes the numbering system flexible and allows users to select whichever format suits their book structure.
In addition, Pressbooks currently numbers chapters continuously across the whole book.
We added an option to switch this behavior:
- Continuous numbering (default, current Pressbooks behavior
- Restart numbering for each Part
This allows more flexibility for authors with specific structural or pedagogical needs.
I’d appreciate hearing whether this feature aligns with Pressbooks’ vision for future improvements.
If it does, I’d be happy to discuss the next steps.
Thanks very much for your feedback.