Custom Styles is a feature that allows you to customize the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for your theme in Pressbooks to change visual elements such as typography, spacing, colors, and more.

Note: If you are using the BCcampus hosted version of Pressbooks, there are certain elements that are part of the house style and can’t be changed. The BCcampus branding, the look and colour of the webbook framing and table of contents, these will be the same for all BCcampus Pressbooks.

Theme Styles

Theme web styles displays the all the CSS that gives the theme its look and feel.  You can’t edit the theme CSS, but you can search within it by clicking into the text box and use CTRL  or Cmd +F. This feature allows you to refer to the CSS in the existing theme, to help ensure that the CSS you add doesn’t clash with the theme’s predefined styles. The CSS you enter in your Web Styles will override the Theme Styles.

CSS Comments

It’s helpful to include a label for what that code is intended to do (also called a CSS comment). You can see that here, designated by the forward slash asterisk.

Adding these descriptive notes can help you keep track of the changes you’ve made, and easily delete CSS that isn’t working or that you no longer need. If you are working on a team, CSS comments will also help your co-authors understand the changes you have made.