How do I reorder front matter sections in Pressbooks?

Pressbooks automatically sorts front matter according to the Chicago Manual of Style if you assign chapter types. If you choose to add, for example, an epigraph and a dedication, your front matter might look like this:

If these two section have been properly tagged as an epigraph and dedication (for more on this see our chapter on Front Matter) and you export them, you will see that their order has been reversed. This is because the Chicago Manual of Style order overrides the order in which you see your front matter in the “Organize” window. In a PDF, you would see:

• Half title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents

But there is an easy fix–simply swap the tags on the dedication and the epigraph to change the order in which they appear.

Alternatively, if you wanted both to appear after the TOC, you can label them as ‘Miscellaneous’.

But wait, there’s more! If you would like to also include front matter before the title page (such as praise, or other books by the author), you can tag it as ‘Before Title Page’ to once again override the usual order of things.

NOTE: Each specified ‘tag’ has its own styling which can affect how your final pages will look.  If necessary, you may need to apply custom CSS to change how they appear.