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    March 2025

Pressbooks Product Updates March 2025

New Features

PDF Previews

The export page now includes an option to generate a PDF preview before generating an actual PDF. This option allows you to inspect the PDF preview in your browser, helping you catch formatting issues, review page layouts, and ensure everything looks as expected—saving time and avoiding multiple exports. The PDF preview option on the diagnostics page has also been updated so that the PDF styles are regenerated before loading the preview, ensuring that the latest changes to your stylesheet are reflected in this preview.

Math Display Improvements

We’ve upgraded our MathJax integration, adding support for new inline delimiters. This means equations and formulas will now display more accurately and consistently across different formats, improving readability for students and educators. You can find more details on this update in our new feature highlight below.

🚨  New Feature Highlight 🚨 

Improved Support for Mathematical and Scientific notation in Pressbooks

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve made it easier than ever before for authors to write and display mathematical and scientific notation in Pressbooks using our built-in LaTeX/MathJax solution.

What’s New?

  • More Delimiters: You can now use conventional LaTeX delimiters like \( … \), \[ … \], and $$ … $$ in addition to the existing [latex] and $latex shortcodes.
  • Expanded Package Support: We’ve added support for several commonly used LaTeX packages, including AMS math, chemistry formulas, physics notation, color formatting, and more.
  • Full support for EPUB and PDF exports: Expressions will be automatically rendered as accessible images in offline export files where MathJax is not available (like PDF and EPUB).
  • MathJax upgrade: Expressions are now rendered in the browser using MathJax 3, which includes several improvements (https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v3.2-latest/upgrading/whats-new-3.0.html

Example in Pressbooks:

Example of formula with Mathjax notation

What This Means for You

If you’ve been writing math or scientific notation in Pressbooks, you’ll find it easier to use familiar LaTeX syntax. Supported expressions will render properly everywhere with no extra work or configuration required.

If you or your authors activated the WP Quick LaTeX plugin in order to use additional features that were not previously available in the native Pressbooks solution, you can consider deactivating that plugin to see whether the native solution now meets your needs.

To learn more about the different methods for rending math in your book, see our updated guide chapter. If you have previously published guides for your local users, consider updating them with this new information.

Other Improvements

  • More Accessible Navigation: We’ve made sure top navigation items are easier to access on mobile.
  • Better Labels for Checkboxes: The export page checkboxes are now clearly labeled for better usability.
  • Licensed Image Fix: Licensed images now have proper accessibility labels.” to “Updated the markup for Creative Commons license icons to improve accessibility
  • Non-Latin Characters: We’ve fixed an issue with taxonomy terms using non-Latin characters.
  • Performance Boost: We’ve made various backend optimizations to make the platform faster and more stable.
  • Styling Fixes: We’ve made some small UI tweaks, including better button styles for call-to-actions.