Proposal: Flexible Numbering Options for Book Parts and Chapters

Contributing to Pressbooks
1

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.

2

Hi Mika,

Thank you for sharing this info. I’m definitely be interested in seeing your implementation. Please feel free to create a PR in github and we will have a look at it.

Best,

Christopher

3

This sounds like a thoughtful and valuable enhancement. The ability to choose different numbering formats for Parts and Chapters would give authors much greater flexibility in matching the structure and style of their publications. Supporting Roman numerals, alphabetical sequences, and configurable chapter numbering aligns well with the diverse needs of academic, instructional, and professional content.

The option to restart chapter numbering within each Part is particularly useful for textbooks, manuals, and multi-section works where independent numbering can improve navigation and clarity. Since the proposed changes preserve the current behavior as the default, they also maintain backward compatibility for existing users.

Overall, this seems like a practical feature that could benefit a wide range of Pressbooks authors, and it would be interesting to explore how it might fit into the platform’s long-term roadmap.