H2O is primarily a digital platform, able to pull from many online sources on the fly. However, we’ve learned from users who are students that having physical copies of casebooks is important for their study habits. There has long been an option to export a casebook from H2O for printing; we’ve recently been putting more development work into making that export as ready as possible to be printed like a bound text.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve deployed a handful of updates that improve the export experience for casebooks across the board. Our goal is for authors to be able to click Export and then Print in quick succession, and end up with an object that looks and feels like a traditional book. Here are the highlights:

More Reliability

Especially in the case of longer casebooks, exports are much more reliably exported as Word documents.

Footnotes

Footnotes - from imported CAP cases as well as those in text written by casebook authors - will be recognized by Word as footnotes, not just styled text. This means you can use your usual footnote workflow to renumber and restyle them as you’d like.

Default Styles

Our design team overhauled the default styling for exports. Improvements include:

  1. Integration into Word’s native styling, which makes it easier to adjust formatting across the board while maintaining document structure.

  2. More effective element contrast for different types of text such as subtitles, headers, and URLs.

  3. Dedicated pages for new chapters, which make chapter breaks more idiomatic and clarify the separation of content.

These updates are now live on the site! Please reach out to us at info@opencasebook.org with any questions or feedback.