Texts are the key format for engaged reading in Manifold. Located within Projects or Journal Issues, Texts allow Readers to engage with material through comment annotations, referring to Resources, or highlighting passages of interest.
For detailed information on how to add and manage Texts to Manifold, see the Manifold Documentation for Managing Texts. This includes guidance not only on ingesting Texts, but also managing Text layout, access permissions, and metadata.
Adding Texts
- Behind the scenes, Texts are stored within Manifold as EPUBs and can be added to or updated within Manifold using “ingests.” Ingesting a Text means you add a Text to Manifold from an already existing source file (e.g., an EPUB, a Word DOCX, or Google Doc), the application runs a series of transformations that make possible the various features and functionalities in the Manifold Reader. You can add Texts to Projects in one of the following formats: Reflowable EPUBs, HTML, Markdown, Microsoft Word Documents (DOCX), and Google Docs.
- Once you have created a Project in Manifold, you can begin adding Texts to it in a few ways. All of these steps take place in Admin Mode. For detailed instructions on how to ingest Texts using the compatible file formats, see “Ingesting New Texts” in the Manifold documentation.
- Texts and their layouts can be edited in Admin Mode (e.g., adding or changing a Table of Contents), and now, you can edit the content of Texts directly using the Manifold Editor (see the section “Editing Text content” below).
- Manifold also allows you to upload individual files for each section of a Text! This is a helpful feature because it allows you to edit sections and add content without having to reingest the entire Text or work in the Manifold Text Editor on the backend.
- For more straightforward instructions for ingesting a Manifold text via Word Docs, see the walkthrough “Ingesting Word Documents.”
Editing Text content
- Manifold now has a Text editor (referred to as the Manifold Editor) available in the backend! With the Editor, instead of having to return to the original source files (like an EPUB or Word Document) you ingested, making changes to those files, and then re-ingesting them, you now have the opportunity to simply make adjustments to existing content right in the Manifold backend. This is helpful for minor edits, but is not recommended for drafting Texts, especially since there is no autosave.
- The Manifold Editor allows for Rich Text editing (similar to the text editors in Google Docs or Microsoft Word) and editing in HTML. HTML is useful for more complex formatting (e.g., embedding multimedia assets or iFrames directly into your Text) and is the behind-the-scenes language in which Manifold content (and most of the Internet!) is structured, but it can be harder to use without further training.
- For instructions on how to edit Texts using the Manifold Editor, see this article in the Manifold documentation.
