Bloom version 6.0 introduces a new page styling system that we’re calling “Appearance”.

Goals of the Appearance System

• Enable users to select from a set of pre-designed “Page Themes” that set things like margins, spacing, corner rounding, background colors, and page number handling

• Make it easy for users to decide what fields to show on the cover (language name, topic, L2, and L3)

• Shift to smaller margins and gutter by default

• Simplify Bloom’s built-in stylesheets

• Enable collection-wide settings that can be overridden if needed by individual books (not yet in Bloom 6.0)

• Prepare the groundwork for phasing out customBookStyles.css and customBookCollections.css in the future

  <aside> ℹ️ Over time, we intend to gradually deprecate the use of custom CSS in Bloom and replace it primarily with Themes + Book Settings.

  </aside>

• Do all of the above while keeping books backward-compatible with previous versions of Bloom (this was hard)

  <aside> ℹ️ (our intent is that) Books made with Bloom 6.0 are compatible with previous versions of Bloom.

  </aside>

Bloom 6.0 Appearance Features

• A new “Book Settings” Dialog that lets you change some things that previously would have required custom CSS.
• A set of “themes” that users can apply to their book.
• An automatic conversion of some of the most common customBookStyles.css files to a corresponding theme.
• A new “default” theme with the most commonly requested changes to margins and other spacing.
• A “legacy 5.6” theme that retains the margins and spacing of previous Bloom versions.

Expected Future Appearance Features

• Add Book Settings defaults to the Collection Settings, so that you can have all the books use the same themes and other settings
• Individual books will be able to override the Collection Settings

The migration from the old to the new system

If a book is “saveable”, Bloom 6.0 will migrate it to the new system. It will do this in a way that will allow the book to keep working in older Blooms, Bloom Readers, and BloomPUB Viewers.