Export & Check the PDF Book – digital and print

Once the web version of your book is finalized, some work must be done to streamline the content and ensure a good user experience for those who may download the book in PDF to a device, print it, or access on a device offline. The main difference between the “digital PDF” and the “print PDF” is the treatment of links, interactive activities and video.

• In the digital PDF
  • descriptive links are clickable
  • interactive activities and videos are replaced with a notice that the element has been removed, and a link back to the web book is provided
• In the print PDF
  • descriptive links are underlined, but cannot be clicked or accessed
  • URL is not accessible to the reader unless you’ve added specific tagging throughout the book to enable this ( div class=”external” in HTML enhancements)

To check your PDF for digital and print versions of the OER, you must use the export tool in Pressbooks to generate the files.

To export preliminary PDF versions

1. Toggle “Display attributions at the end of a chapter” off in the Appearance > Theme options area of the book*
2. Navigate to Export, and select the options for digital PDF and print PDF
3. Click export and wait for the files to appear below

*You will turn this feature back on after you’ve finalized the PDF books. Also dependent on book set up.

To check the digital PDF – open the file on the exports page

Scroll through the file slowly, checking to ensure that:

• Videos appear as a watch statement, but not the “an interactive element has been removed” link
• The text version of H5P activities appear, but not the “an interactive element has been removed” link
• Images that are purely decorative are omitted
• Check page breaks for weird spots of significant whitespace – You may need to adjust coding or image size in these areas to improve the PDF version

To check the print PDF – open the file on the exports page

Scroll through the file slowly, checking to ensure that:

• Videos appear as a watch statement, but not the “an interactive element has been removed” link
  • YouTube video links are standardized and cleaned up, displayed in following format after the watch statement: https://youtu.be/hd5zhcZrQ3A
• The text version of H5P activities appear, but not the “an interactive element has been removed” link
  • Answers are posted in a footnote
  • Fill in the blank spaces don’t appear as _________ (use span tagging)
• Images that are purely decorative are omitted
• Check page breaks for weird spots of significant white space – You may need to adjust coding or image size in these areas to improve the PDF version
• Check that external link tagging have been added
  • To links that leave the OER / external resources
  • To the most accurate source of the page (eg: the page level in another OER) in the attribution statement
  • On the acknowledgements and accessibility pages, and any ancillary resource pages as needed

To Publish the downloadable versions

Once the PDF exports have been checked, it’s time to optimize the files for posting to the book. For a fast start up, you can use the Sharing & Privacy settings to post the PDF on the main page of the OER. However, these files are not streamlined or optimized.

See the next page for full details